t all stations the local
tracks rise several feet towards the street and slope off in both
directions, while the express tracks do this only at stations at which
the faster trains stop. This gives the passengers a shorter distance
to descend or rise in the elevators, and the ascent before the stations
aids the brakes in stopping, while the drop helps the motors to start
the trains quickly in getting away.

"Photography has also made great strides, and there is now no
difficulty in reproducing exactly the colours of the object taken.

"Telephones have been so improved that one person can speak in his
natural voice with another in any part of the globe, the wire that
enables him to hear also showing him the face of the speaker though he
be at the antipodes. All telephone wires being underground and kept by
themselves, they are not interfered with by any high-tension
electric-light or power wires, thunderstorms, or anything else.

"Rain-making is another subject removed from the uncertainties, and has
become an absolute science. We produce clouds by explosions in the
atmosphere's heights and by surface air forced by blowers through large
pipes up the side of a mountain or natural elevation and there
discharged through an opening in the top of a tower built on the
highest part. The aeriduct is incased in a poor heat-conductor, so
that the air retains its warmth until discharged, when it is cooled by
expansion and the surrounding cold air. Condensation takes place and
soon serves to start a rain.

"Yet, until the earth's axis is straightened, we must be more or less
dependent on the eccentricities of the weather, with extremes of heat
and cold, droughts and floods, which last are of course largely the
result of several months' moisture held on the ground in the form of
snow, the congestion being relieved suddenly by the warm spring rains.

"Medicine and surgery have kept pace with other
improvements--inoculation and antiseptics, as already seen, rendering
most of the germ diseases and formerly dreaded epidemics impotent;
while through the potency of electrical affinity we form wholesome
food-products rapidly, instead of having to wait for their production
by Nature's slow processes.

"The metric system, now universal, superseded the old-fashioned
arbitrary standards, so prolific of mistakes and confusion, about a
century ago.

"English, as we have seen, is already the language of 600,000,000
people, and the num