Cambridge Essays, 1855-58 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: TELEGRAPHIC COMMUNICATION WITH INDIA. T AIL WAYS have superseded roads and canals for the con- JLV veyance of passengers and light goods?the electric telegraph has superseded railways in the conveyance of intelligence. The mechanical genius of this age has enabled man to apply to his purposes the power that pervades all space, and seems, by its wonderful properties of traversing inconceivable distances, and producing its effects in fractions of time that can hardly be calculated, rather to belong to infinity than to this world. Yet so it is; Providence has suffered this wonderful element to become the servant of mankind; and the ' dominion' given to Adam ' over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth/ seems, in these days, to be extended to that which especially appertains to regions beyond the earth. A mechanical contrivance, called the electric telegraph, produces, transmits, and registers, at the close of its career, the effects of the electric element. Those effects upon iron, or chemically prepared paper, constitute an alphabet; and the person who witnesses them, at the distance of hundreds and even thousands of miles from whence they proceeded, can, instantaneously afterwards, read the mind of the person who produced them. Such is the power that man now possesses to communicate with his fellow-man. This power has been extensively used in Europe and the United States for political, commercial, personal, and domestic purposes?not forgetting the daily use the press makes of it. As yet, however, the telegraph does not connect distant parts of the world. The different countries that it does connect are not very distant, and do not stand in the relation of countries which are inhabited by the same race, and which...