there are always plenty hanging about. If, then, any person should experience extraordinary delay in receiving a message, he should, as a matter of duty, complain to the Secretary in Cannon Street, for it is only by so doing that the sound working of the system can be insured. We have been very slow in adopting the new system, but the public are beginning rapidly to see the value of the wire in intra-metropolitan communications. For instance, the messages have increased from 73,480 received in 1860, to 251,548 received in 1862; and the trading community, as well as individuals for domestic and social purposes, are beginning to use it. For instance, Mr. Chubb notifies, through public advertisements, that in case any person should have left the key of his safe or desk at home, by telegraphing to him he will send a duplicate to any address. Tradesmen, again, inform their customers that they may give their orders free of charge by means of the telegraph. In order to foster this branch of business, messages at the rate of one hundred for twenty shillings are now issued. As the head office in Cannon Street (City) is in communication with all the electric lines both land and submarine, these district offices may be considered as not only for the use of the metropolis, but as gatheringpoints for the country and continental telegraphs. The London District Telegraph Company have been laying out private wires for the use of individuals requiring to telegraph between their own establishments, but this is a line of business in which they cannot compete, we think, successfully, with the

Universal Private Telegraph Company, for reasons which we shall explain.

The Universal Private Telegraph Company make no outward sign like the District Company; indeed, they have no points of contact with the crowds who pass along the streets. The Company simply undertakes to put the merchant's country-house in direct communication with his office, houses of business with their branches, public offices with public offices; in fact, its mission is to supply renters with so many miles of private wire to run between house and house at a given price, and to provide telegraphic apparatus which can be worked by persons in the office, or counter, or drawing-room, as the case may be. Of course, it would be impossible profitably to provide a separate wire with its appropriate suspending posts to every renter at any reasonable price. Consequently, a system of combined action has been adopted for which Professor Wheatstone has taken out a patent. For instance, supposing that a hundred renters of wires lie on either hand of some great main thoroughfare, these hundred wires, for such a distance as they can be conveniently made to run together, are enclosed in one cable, carefully insulated from each other by india-rubber. These cables are so arranged as to form nearly equilateral triangles, each angle having a base of nearly a mile; the cable, however, being supported by wires slung from posts erected on the tops of the houses at every two hundred yards. At the intersection of every angle a mile apart, straining posts are erected for tightening the wires and for

giving each individual wire its direction of departure. If the spectator only observes one of these posts, he will see that it gives off filaments of wire in every direction: these private wires, having come along the cable in common with others for a given distance, are now making their way down into the offices and houses of their renters in the most direct way they can consistently with the triangular system of laying out the lines we have mentioned. Although a hundred wires are in some instances embedded in the same cable, the Company find no difficulty in discovering immediately the fault that may occur in any one of them, as at every two hundred yards the suspending pole is provided with a connecting box or plate pierced with small holes, through which every

separate wire, going or returning, spreads out from the cable, and having thus passed, is bound together again on the other side and proceeds to the next point.

These holes are all numbered; consequently any failure of the electric current can be narrowed to a distance of 200 yards, and at once set right. By this system of telegraphy the communication is instantaneous; there is no waiting until other messages have passed, for the simple reason that no one else but the renter can possibly use it. Its speed is also greatly in its favour; as many as 150 letters a minute can be telegraphed by a nimble hand, whilst any person can send and read messages by it. The needle telegraph used by the skilled operators on the long lines is perfectly unintelligible to the uninitiated; but the

stone are employed. The Communicator looks like a small clock, with the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and the nine numerals inscribed on its face; each of these letters and numerals is moved by a small lever. The person telegraphing, by pressing down the pedal or lever attached to each letter, sends a pulse of electricity through the length of wire, which makes a needle point to a similar letter on the face of an Indicator at the other end of the wire, which is being watched by the person receiving the message. We may remark here that it has been objected that unless a person is always in the room where the message is received, and whose attention would have been attracted to the Indicator by the ringing of its bell,

that messages would in these private transactions. often be told to the barren air; but Professor Wheatstone has just completed a most extraordinary instrument, by which messages are printed in ordinary letter type on slips of tinfoil, and no human receiver