( 18 ) miles, simply in the same breath declare that a cable 500 miles can he worked at five or six times the speed; and therefore their arguments are against the advisability of adopting a long circuit, and strongly in favour of short ones. No doubt it will be said that one word per minute is a small speed to allow for a 2000-mile cable from Valentia to St. John’s; but I am convinced it will prove quite up to, if not above, the ave- rage speed obtained and paid for (no matter what cable is laid on that route) ; if the working of the old cable is any guide, a new cable would not work one word in two minutes, let alone one word in one minute. At the very time the Atlantic cable was supposed to be working so splendidly, it took twenty hours to transmit her Majesty’s Message through the cable—not four words per hour. It was begun at five o’clock one morning and finished at seven o’clock the next morning. Six haurs of this time was taken up in operations to repair the cable at Valentia; 180 yards of Morse-paper were consumed to record this message intel- ligibly at Newfoundland, the signals received there being of the most confused description. A gentleman sent down by the Direc- tors to examine and report on the working of the cable tried it for his own satisfaction no later than the 18th of August, and he obtained a speed of ten words in nine hours. The writer witnessed the working of the cable from the transmission of the Queen’s Message up to the receipt of the President’s reply, and the speed obtained was not ten intelligible words per hour, to say nothing of one word per minute ; in fact, the greatest praise is due to the telegraph clerks who were at Valentia for their laborious patience, otherwise there would never have been a single word obtained through the cable. The manner in which they extricated a word out of a confused jumble of “ electrical currents ” and “ earth currents” was something wonderful; and so much was this, that it was not safe to retain a single word in a message until it had been repeated over and over again as correct. Those parties who talk so glibly about five or ten words per minute as the average

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