and admiration, the inaugural address of the President of this Institute. We should, I am sure, consider ourselves fortunate, and unite in our felicitations that we have as our presiding officer for this year a gentleman who has .so thoroughly proved his powers of observation; who has combined with those powers of observation the faculty of so happily putting them into exceptionally graphic language, and who possesses the literary faculty of being capable to develop in so short a time, not only a thoroughly readable, but a thoroughly eloquent and therefore listenable a production.

It appears to me that his comments upon the necessarily cooperative and co-ordinate relations of true theory and true practice, and his very decidedly expressed opinion that what God has joined together, no man or committee should put asunder, especially are of such a character as to commend themselves to every one.

And I have very great pleasure, Mr. Secretary, in moving a vote of thanks to the President for his able and instructive inaugural address, with the request that he permit the same to be published in the proceedings of the Institute.

[The motion was seconded by Mr. Phelps, and carried unanimously after being put by the Secretary.]

The President:—Gentlemen, I thank you.

1 know that I voice the sentiments of the Institute when I take the liberty of calling on our distinguished honorary member to give you in a brief address, some of his impressions of the Congress, or anything else that he may feel like talking to us about. | Applause.]

Mr. Pkkeck:—Mr. President and Gentlemen, if it had not been for the alacrity of Mr. Lockwood, I think that I should have claimed the indulgence of this meeting to have broken your rules, and asked you to allow me, in our usual English fashion, to propose a vote of thanks to your President for the clear, able and extremely interesting address that he has given you. But my wish has been forestalled, and I am asked to give you my thoughts, or an address on anything. Of course, I cannot go beyond Chicago, and 1 cannot forget the Congress. At the same time I did feel a certain sensation of satisfaction and pride when, in the earlier part of his address, your President referred to the four hundred years' history of this great Republic. When he made that allusion, I could not forget the fact that for about three hundred years this so-called republic was acting under the guidance of the Old Country at home. [Applause.] So that I feel that of whatever progress you have made here, we can at any rate claim some little share. Action, sir, and re-action, we have all been told, and, I have no doubt, you have often taught, are exactly similar, and, while in the past, a hundred years ago or more, you taught us a very severe lesson by foolishly chucking some tea into the sea, we on the other hand have learned a much greater lesson, and ever since then have allowed all our children to do just whatever they like, and they always do it. [Applause.] I cannot also forget that your President referred to the history of electrical enterprise in this country during the past nine years, from 1884. It happens that that year was exactly coincident with niy last visit to this great country. I was present at the exhibition in Philadelphia, in 1884, and when I look back to the history of the past nine years, I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that every single advance of any consequence or any value has taken place in this country. You alluded especially to the introduction of motors. There is nothing that strikes us, who come over from the other side of the Atlantic, so much as the marvelous, the wonderful advance that has been made in the extension of electric railways. I have come over here not alone to attend the Congress, not alone to see the World's Fair, but to see, to the utmost of ray ability, during the time allowed me, all progress made in all branches of electrical industry, and while the advances in telephony, and the advances in electric lighting and other applications of electricity are great and striking, thenis nothing so wonderful and so astounding as the development of electric railways, and particularly of electric railways in Boston. You made some allusion, too, to the wonders of science, and that we, who come day by day, in the performance of our allotted tasks, to the application of science to the wants and purposes of mankind, are apt to get rather careless and indifferent to the wonders of science that are displayed about us. So far as I am personally concerned, 1 do not agree with you in that respect. There is not a single day of my life that 1 do not feel the utmost wonderment at the advances of science, and especially of electricity, and although nothing is more startling and wonderful than the reproduction of the human voice, and the production of the electric light, still all these fade when you come to think of the marvelous influence of light in producing pictures. There is something in the interaction of those undulatory movements that constitute light and produce pictures, and those undulatory movements that you allude to as beiug in the domain whicn Tesla is now exploring; there is something in the connection between light and sound, and electricity and motion generally, that indicates a reason why the conveners of the Congress at Chicago should have divided the subject into pure theory and pure practice. Theory covers a field. There is a held that is apart from practice. There is a Held in which the philosopher wanders and gives play to his imagination, and I cannot help thinking that we are now, thanks to the practice of the past, gradually approaching a shore on which we can pick up pebbles that will sooner or later give us a clue and an indication of the actual existence of the marvelous power or force that sometimes we call electricity, sometimes energy, sometimes light, but which is really the evidence of some wonderful agency which exists in nature, of which at the present moment we are absolutely ignorant. And therefore it is, that electricity shadows before us something that enables the old gentlemen,—you and I, sir,—to wander at will in fields that will warrant future congresses in justifying the division of the Congress in Chicago into two classes at any rate, practice and theory.

Now you must not forget this,—that one part of the Congress at Chicago was governmental and official. It was called together by the government of the United States; it was responded to by every government in Europe, aud we met together there. I am delighted to hear you grumble and growl. It is one of the privileges of the Anglo-Saxon race to be able to growl to their heart's content. By your grumbling and your growling you save the necessity for anybodv else doing it. It would be extremely ungracious, it would be inhospitable, it would be outrageous on the part of a guest like myself to grumble and growl. At the same time I am glad to have it done. [Applause.]

Now I interrupted you, sir, when you suggested that the henry was proposed by Mascart and seconded oy myself. I should have been delighted to second it. Nothing on earth that I know of would have given me greater pleasure than to have seconded that proposal, and I was prepared to do it. But we thought there was an additional grace in its being seconded by Professor Ayrton, for Professor Ayrton had himself proposed a name for this unit—a secohm—and he in conjunction with Professor Perry had invented an instrument to measure the unit, called a secohmmeter, and there was something particularly pretty in the notion that the henry should be proposed by such a Frenchman as Mascart, and seconded by such an Englishman as Ayrton. [Loud applause.]

Yon also implied that the work of the American Institute Of Electkical Engineers did not receive its full meed of praise. I do not care two pence about the World's Fair, or the World's Congress Auxiliary, or what they may have done, but I know this, that I am expressing the sentiments of every single foreigner—I do not call myself a foreigner, as you know—but I express the feeling of everybody there, that there was one haven of rest where we could all go to receive a little comfort, and that was the office of the Institute Of Electrical Engineers of America, and there was one cheery face that always welcomed us there, was glad to see us and who did all lie could to make our visit to Chicago as pleasant as it could be made. And it was pleasant. I do not think that I can refer to any visit that I have ever made anywhere, that I shall recall with greater pleasure than my visit to Chicago, and especially it will be associated with the American Institute Of Electrical Engineers; not because they did as much as they could do, but because of all the titles and honors that I hold, there i6 not one which I feel a greater pride in holding than that of being an honorary member of the American Institute Of Electrical Engineers.

Sir, it was my intention to propose a vote of thanks to you. I do not propose that vote of thanks, because it has been done. But I desire to express to you my great obligations for giving me such a capital resume of what you saw at Chicago and what 1 saw. I do not mind telling you, gentlemen, that I came over to this country to steal all I could, and I intend to go back and make use of all I have learned, and one thing I certainly shall do, I shall make free use of your ideas, sir, and in the report I make to the Institution of Electrical Engineers, and in the reports that I make to her Majestv's government of what I have done and seen here, I shall certainly refer to the address delivered to this Institute, and also to the good work that has been done by this Institute, membership in which I feel such a pride of holding. [Applause.]

There is just one point that I wish to refer to.

Your President alluded to the fact of the work left undone. He said that I was prepared to carry on that work in England, as your honorary member, and I shall do so, not alone because I am an honorary member of this Institute, but because I am deeply interested in the adoption by the electrical fraternity of a unit, not of light, but of illumination. I want to know what is the light on that paper. I do not care a button where it comes from. It may be gas, or a candle, or the sun, or the moon. We want to be able to express in something that we understand as clearly as we understand the ohm, the ampere or the henry; we want to express exactly what is the illumination on that paper; and therefore it is that I support for that purpose with all my power the proposal of your President, for the establishment of a committee to deal with this matter. We will work at it very hard in England and I hope that we shall be able to do something to enable you to come to a decision.

The President :—Gentlemen, the hour is running; on. Will you take any action in this matter? There is really no motion before the Institute. I think the Institute can do very excellent work in this connection.

Mk. F. W. Jones :—-I move Mr. President, that the Chair be authorized to appoint a committee to carry out the suggestions made in the Inaugural Address of the President.

[The motion was carried, and the Chair subsequently appointed Mr. A. E. Kennelly, Dr. Wm. E. Greyer and Mr. Carl Ilering.]

Mr. Steinmetz:—I would like to say a few words on a matter that has been considered several times here, viz.: the establishment of local branches or chapters of the Institute. I wish to sound the sentiment of the Institute about the establishment of a chapter in Lynn.

As you know, there is an electrical organization there, having somethine; like 70 or 90 members, and about the same tendency as our Institute here. At the last meeting of this organization— the Thomson Scientific Club—the question was brought up whether it would be advisable to join hands with the American Institute Of Electrical Engineers. No definite action was taken, but I was instructed to ascertain the state of feeling here in New York. The main reason was and is, undoubtedly, the rapidly increasing influence and importance of this Institute as displayed during the time of the Electrical Congress in Chicago, and as expressed in the scientific papers published in the TransActions of the Institute. We knew that this question had been discussed here by the Institute frequently, and that, as I believe, the general sentiment was towards the establishment of such chapters.

Now I should like to hear what the members think about this question, and how they would stand if the proposition to unite with the Institute were brought up by the Thomson Scientific Club of Lynn. Our idea was, that some kind of an arrangement could be made so that election to membership would take place in the same manner as before, by the Council of the Institute; that the local chapter would have the right to elect local members, which would have full vote on all local matters, but have novote on general mattters, and that at the time of consolidation, the members of the local organization who are not members of the Institute, become local members.

In Lynn out of 70 or 80 members of the local organization there are about ten or fifteen members of the Institutk, and the cause for this small percentage is that the tendency of the local organization is about the same on a smaller scale as that of the Institute. Most of the electrical engineers there think it their duty to build up the local organization, and they do not care to be members of the two organizations, and therefore do not become members of the Institute, but now that it has reached such importance, they would like to be members of it without giving up their local organization.

Furthermore I think there would be no difficulty in having papers read before the local organization printed in the TranSaction's under the same conditions as they are now printed, i. e. that the author of a paper sends it in for acceptance a sufficient time before the meeting to have the advance copies printed, or in other words that members of the Institute have the right to read their paper before the local branch, instead of before the general organization; or where it is desirable, to read the paper personally at the one, and by proxy at the other meeting. I would like to hear from the members what their opinion would be upon such a proposition.

Mr. Hammer:—I would suggest that, as this same question has recently come up in connection with the city of Cincinnati, the city of Philadelphia, and the city of Chicago, the Thomson Scientific Club be requested to send a report, embodying their views, to the Council, and have it taken up in connection with these other applications, and then have the Council submit the matter for the approval of the Institute.