Now that electricity is manufactured and distributed in towns and villages for the electric light, it is more and more employed for driving the lighter machinery.  Steam, however, is more economical on a large scale, and still continues to be used in great factories for the heavier machinery.  Nevertheless a day is coming when coal, instead of being carried by rail to distant works and cities, will be burned at the pit mouth, and its heat transformed by means of engines and dynamos into electricity for distribution to the surrounding country.  I have shown elsewhere that peat can be utilised in a similar manner, and how the great Bog of Allen is virtually a neglected gold field in the heart of Ireland. [Footnote:  The Nineteenth Century for December 1894.] The sunshine of deserts, and perhaps the electricity of the atmosphere, but at all events the power of winds, waves, and waterfalls are also destined to whirl the dynamo, and yield us light, heat, or motion.  Much has already been done in this direction.  In 1891 the power of turbines driven by the Falls of Neckar at Lauffen was transformed into electricity, and transmitted by a small wire to the Electrical Exhibition of Frankfort-on-the-Main, 117 miles away.  The city of Rome is now lighted from the Falls of Tivoli, 16 miles distant.  The finest cataract in Great Britain, the Falls of Foyers, in the Highlands, which persons of taste and culture wished to preserve for the nation, is being sacrificed to the spirit of trade, and deprived of its waters for the purpose of generating electricity to reduce aluminium from its ores.

The great scheme recently completed for utilizing the power of Niagara Falls by means of electricity is a triumph of human enterprise which outrivals some of the bold creations of Jules Verne.

When in 1678 the French missionaries La Salle and Hennepin discovered the stupendous cataract on the Niagara River between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, the science of electricity was in its early infancy, and little more was known about the mysterious force which is performing miracles in our day than its manifestation on rubbed amber, sealing-wax, glass, and other bodies.  Nearly a hundred years had still to pass ere Franklin should demonstrate the identity of the electric fire with lightning, and nearly another hundred before Faraday should reveal a mode of generating it from mechanical power.  Assuredly, neither La Salle nor his contemporaries ever dreamed of a time when the water-power of the Falls would be distributed by means of electricity to produce light or heat and serve all manner of industries in the surrounding district.  The awestruck Iroquois Indians had named the cataract “Oniagahra,” or Thunder of the Waters, and believed it the dwelling-place of the Spirit of Thunder.  This poetical name is none the less appropriate now that the modern electrician is preparing to draw his lightnings from its waters and compel the genius loci to become his willing bondsman.