In the speeches which were made at this great function, it was evident that the Englishmen expect to see the horseless carriages engaged at once in the transportation of farm products. This will be possible over their roads, of course, long before mechanical considerations will allow it in America. The optimists of the Motor Club think that these automatic farm-wagons will effect a veritable revolution in the transportation of grain and fertilizers.

The statisticians say that a distance of only two miles from a railway station doubles the cost of marketing grain in the average rural district. And if this item of transportation can be cut in half by substituting oil and electricity for horses, the saving to the farmer will certainly be enormous. It seems definitely agreed that the horseless variety of wagon can be operated at least fifty per cent. cheaper than the old and animated style. The careful calculations of the London Electric Cab Co., which is about to put three hundred and fifty electrically propelled cabs on the streets of London, show that a day's charge for operating expenses, counting capital charges, for an automatic vehicle will be 5s. 72d., as against 12s. 21⁄2d. for the present hansom cab.

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BOUT the middle of next month New York harbor will receive its first visit from the new steamer Pennsylvania, which, in point of tonnage, is the very biggest ship in the world. There is a rather inexplicable pleasure in the phrase and the object it describes; when there was only one five master in the coasting trade, every tourist and fisherman on the New England coast would hurry to catch a glimpse of her majesty, where a score of four-masters would not persuade one man to turn in his tracks. The great Cunarders are as long as this new leviathan, and her sisters of the HamburgAmerican Line, with their three smoke-stacks in tandem, give a suggestion of superior

power, but the undeniable fact that the Pennsylvania is the hugest carrier on the ocean assures her a certain pre-eminence of interest.

Nor is she, even in the matter of tonnage, the largest ship that has been built. The Great Eastern registered 22,500 tons when loaded to the water-line, while the Pennsylvania's capacity is 20,000; but then the Great Eastern never could be fully laden because that implied a draught of 30 feet, enough to prevent her access to any of our principal seaports. How successful has been the endeavor of marine engineers to increase the carrying power of the largest ships without making an impracticable draught and awkward length and beam, is shown in a comparison of the dimensions of the Great Eastern, the largest ship the world has ever seen, with this Pennsylvania, the largest vessel now afloat.

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The average professional ball-player on a crack team can make a long throw" of about three hundred feet. So if Roger Connor stood at the stern of the Pennsylvania and made his mightiest throw toward the bow, the ball would fall about amidships.

The Pennsylvania will not be in the "greyhound" class, with her thirteen knots an hour, and will take nine days from New York to reach Hamburg. She does not devote herself entirely to freight by any means, as there are accommodations for a thousand steerage and over two hundred cabin passengers. This heavy-weight among ocean liners will be easily distinguished by her four short perpendicular masts and her single great barrel of a smoke-stack. The ship is one of twins that will soon be completed from the Belfast yards.