id="xd21e201" class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[vi]"/>distance, and employed as a means of communication, must have seemed wholly chimerical to its readers; and even as recently as fifty years ago, anyone who predicted the telephone would have been laughed at. When the principle of the accumulator was already discovered a very competent practical electrician told the writer that he need not worry himself much about the idea: there was not the least likelihood that electricity could ever be “bottled up in cisterns”! On the whole there is more likelihood of error in timidity than in boldness when we attempt to foresee what will be attained after the increasingly rapid movement of scientific progress during this twentieth century shall have gathered full force.

For the rest, criticism of this sort is disarmed, because the reader has been in any case invited to enter a realm of more or less pure imagination. No one can exactly know with what births, monstrous or beautiful, the future may teem. Admitting a certain point of view—that of almost unrestrained optimism—the predictions here offered will, it is believed, be found to be along the line of existing progress.

Beaufort House,
Brentford.