IT is customary for a presidential address to be a review of the development of the science with which the Institution is particularly concerned. Such a review is especially beneficial in the case of such a rapidly growing industry as electrical engineering, as the outlook changes considerably during a yeir. Instead of a review of the past, a dream of the future may take the form of a presidential address. This form has great attractions for me for several reasons. In the first place, this kind of prophecy is easy and pleasant, I might draw a rosy picture of a future when everything conceivable is done electrically. We shall have electrical energy developed direct from carbon at the coal-pits. Not only all our lighting, but all our domestic heating will be done electrically. There will be no smoke in our cities or in what will correspond to them. Most of the dirt of our houses will have vanished. Large and crowded towns will have disappeared, because the telegraph will have given way to its wireless rival, and that will have given way to the wireless telephone with no exchanges and no subscriptions. There will thus be no need for people to go and see one another to transact business. Even when matters must be written to preserve a record, no office will be necessary. You will dictate by wireless telephony to your shorthand clerk at his distant house. Perhaps we shall all learn shorthand instead of our present cumbersome system of writing, and all books and letters will be in one language, written and printed phonetically at speaking speed or faster. The horse will have gone, leaving clean and odourless streets, with smooth surfaces on which people will travel in rapid electric automobiles. The railways with very rapid long-distance service will be entirely electric. It is very easy to prophesy in this sort of way, not only in a general way, but in considerable detail; and it is an amusement that brings much credit to the prophet. If any of his prophecies seem unlikely to come true, he merely has to say, “Wait a little!” While if anything like what he foretells comes into existence, say twenty years hence, all he has to do is to refer back to an address to claim that he has foretold it, and the future inventor will have half his credit taken from him and given to the, prophet. If the prophecies are sufficiently vague, there is certain to be some sort of fulfilment of some of them sooner or later, and it is always well to have a good many past publications of this sort in stock waiting for future development.