I will not now trespass on your patience further than will enable me to state that experiments now in hand indicate conclusively that domestic electric lighting of the immediate future will be accomplished in a manner more beautiful and wondrous than was ever shadowed in an Arabian Night’s dream.  I hesitate somewhat to make these vague allusions, since so many wild promises, for which I am not responsible, remain unfulfilled, but the time is surely near at hand when a single touch will illuminate our homes with a light which will combine all the elements of beauty, steadiness, softness, and absolute safety, to a degree as yet undreamed of.  I do not ask you to accept this without question, but only to remember that within the last decade wires have been taught to convey not only articulate sounds, but the individual voices you know amidst a thousand, and even light and heat have each been made the medium of communicating our thoughts to distant places!

Not the least remarkable phenomenon in this connection is the intellectual condition of the people who have welcomed these marvelous achievements and allowed them to enter into their everyday life, thus removing the greatest barriers of the past and paving the way for that philosophical millennium inevitably awaiting those who may be fortunate enough to survive the next decade.

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SUCCESS OF THE ELEVATED RAILWAYS, NEW YORK.

The travel over the elevated steam street railways of New York city for month of October, 1881, was the heaviest yet recorded, aggregating 7,121,961 passengers, as against 5,881,474, for the corresponding month of 1880, an increase of 1,240,487, representing just about the entire population of the city.

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HEDGES’ ELECTRIC LAMPS.

We illustrate a very curious and interesting form of electric regulator which is exhibited in the Paris Exhibition of Electricity by Mr. Killingworth Hedges, whose name will be known to our readers as the author of a little book on the electric light.  Mr. Hedges’ lamp belongs to the same category of electric regulators as the lamp of M. Rapieff, and to one form of M. Reynier’s lamp, that is to say, the position of the ends of the carbons, and therefore of the arc, is determined not by clockwork or similar controlling mechanism, but by the locus of the geometrical intersection of the axes of the carbon rods, the positions of which axes being determined by simple mechanical means.

[Illustration:  Figs. 1 and 2 HEDGES’ ELECTRICAL LAMP AT THE PARIS ELECTRICAL EXHIBITION.]