We are within measurable distance of the day when the pothook will finally nse from troubling and the teacher of "test and commercial hand" will be at rect. The coming of the typewriter marked the beginning of the new er: Pitman with his shorthand and phonetic spelling had prepared the way, but not inti the typewriter was invented and came into general use was the doom of the flowing and usually illegible script absolutely and irrevocably, fixed. that moment it was only a matter of time and the birth of the man with the happy ter that the rest is practice. A speed of 10 words a minute seems fairly easy of minent and for office purposes, the taking of letters from dictation, ete this is usually sufficient, With prac however, thefe is a possibility of writing as many as 100 words a minute. Seeing that the average rate of public orators is 450 words a minute, and we have local rhetoricians who can manage their 200 words a minute for haitan-hour without getting out of breath, the stem typer will need further development fore the professional shorthand writer can turn his attention to less arduous and more remunerative pursuits.
It is one of the merits of the stem typer thit the record, if correctly ton, € ad not orly by the operator bur by any other person acquainted with the code. The record ts taken ca long in paper and the mechanism of that each Fresh Tine begun automatically, without any ug of the carrier, as in the case of writers. In a commercial city ghai we may expect -to find" many students. of stenotypy in a short tine, pecially as the instrament is as cheap as. it is convenient.
While on the subject, attention ina be drawn to a new typewriter—the "Fisher ciwhich seems to touch high-water mark in the world to which it belongs. It is a handsome piece of furniture, fitted to its own conjuring table, so to speak, and it has as many contrivances asa small organ. It. will write in books ax neon sheets of paper; it will take Size sheet with scarcely any adjustment 5 there is practically no limit to the number of carbon copies that can once; it will write in a letter-press book at the same time as making the original letter; it sets itself to and plicated balance sheets like a bank-And it will change from red to bl: or vice verse at will. Messrs: Birch and Ca. are agents for this machine al: o.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.