an
impressive illustration of this tendency. The visitor to the Musee Cluny
in Paris will find, among the masses of relics of an historic pass, the
state carriages used in the time of Louis XV. and Marie Antoinette. They
are incredibly clumsy and gigantic,--the carriage itself mounted on four
great wheels, two of which are very large, with the two front ones
smaller,--the entire vehicle occupying about twice the space of a modern
conveyance, and its weight must be something to reckon with. Several of
these are standing in the Cluny and offer a strange contrast with the
carriages of to-day. But when these, with their lumbering motion, are
contrasted,--not merely with the modern carriage, but with the flying
automobile,--one realizes, indeed, the evolution in the methods of local
transportation.

Again, let one compare the traditions of the sailing vessels on which
passengers crossed to Europe within the memory of men still living,--the
forty days' passage between Boston and Liverpool which is well within
the memory of Doctor Hale,--with the passage on this latest floating
palace of the ocean, the Kaiser Wilhelm II.,--and he realizes how far
science has penetrated into the more subtle forces, where lightness and
speed take the place of clumsy device and slow motion. To go up to the
hurricane deck of the wonderful Kaiser Wilhelm and look down through the
openings on the six mighty engines, with their intense throb of
vibration day and night, is to behold an object lesson in the
possibilities of motion. With the precision and the persistence of fate,
the great beams fly up--and down. The vibration pervades the entire
vast spaces of the great steamer. It becomes like an electric current, a
thing of life, to be missed when one leaves the steamer as if one had
left there a part of his own life. There is an exhilaration in it that
communicates itself to mind and body. It is like a dynamo generating
vitality. And still more swift and subtle methods of loco-motion are in
the air. Doctor Albertson, an electrical engineer of the Royal
University of Denmark, has an invention for a railroad train without
wheels to make a speed of three hundred miles an hour. "Two things
defeated the attainment of speed above the present maximum (sixty miles
an hour)," says a writer in the "New York Herald," and these are
specified as "the dead weight of the train, and aerial resistance.

"Now comes the announcement that there has been discovered a