and of various impediments to the east and west, the great negro empires of Sokoto and Bornu, with the surrounding independent populations of Pullo Fellatah, Songhay, Adamawa, Bagirmi, Waday, Mosi, and others— millions upon millions of industrious men dwelling in the native country of the cotton-plant, and already largely cultivating it-have been from time immemorial utterly cut off from communication with the rest of the world, and are, indeed, only known now to a few persevering readers of the adventurous narratives of a still smaller number of enterprising travellers. What a change would be produced by the opening of the navigation of the Niger by a regular fleet of iron boats, or the simple construction of a practicable road or railway from the western coast to Timbuktu, Sokoto, and Kuka! Two empires and various independent kingdoms and populations would be recovered to the outer world, and the looms of Europe would groan under a plethora of material, such as we might imagine would likewise flow from the establishment of railway communication with the old Assyrian and Babylonian empires, and the conversion of the now waste lands of Chaldæa and Mesopotamia into fields of that gossypion or xylon of whose wool, according to Pliny, the garments of the priests of a remote antiquity were manufactured. The Romans were the greatest power of the old world, and the Romans were the greatest road-makers. "The military roads of the Scottish Highlands terminated fruitless rebellions, but the mineral roads of modern times have done more to civilise mankind than the military roads of Napoleon."

It is something in this monotonous world of ours to get hold of an abstract and original thinker. Men cannot, in our days of incessant competition, often afford to be philosophers. Those who possess only what is called abstract knowledge do not thrive in a worldly sense :

They are in advance of their time, and it must ever be so, for men cannot appreciate the value, even in a worldly sense, of that which they do not themselves know. Therefore a Dalton may starve in his laboratory while the purveyor of the sybarite may revel in his own or in other men's luxuries. And the philosophic discoverer of the laws of light must turn spectacle-maker ere the world can see his value. As philosophical men are rarely practical business men, and cannot put into matter that which they possess in mind, they serve chiefly as a kind of milch cow for another species of men, who reap the worldly profit by possessing that peculiar knowledge and acuteness in which the original-minded men are lacking. And each has his reward after his kind. The taste and habits of the thorough practical man are usually of the more expensive kind. The thoughtful man is simpler in his tastes. But it were a part of wisdom, even in a worldly point of view, that the world should take care of its abstract benefactors, lest, abstracting wholly from them and giving nothing to them in return, the race should die out and leave us a nation of Chinese, reproducing eternally and originating nothing.

Mr. Adams, however, professes to be at once a philosopher and a practical man—the milch cow and the milkman in one-the highest of all combinations personified; and it is with a proportionate amount of interest that we look to what he knows and has to say, for the reason of his publishing was, he intimates, the belief that he knew and had something to say, and which he has endeavoured to put in plain language.

Now what the highway was to the river and canal before steam existed, that has the railway become to the highway-a better road.

"But," Mr. Adams informs us, "it would be a mistake to suppose that railways have culminated either in capacity or structure. The railway in its perfection, complete in all parts, has yet to be invented. Why else the complaint of shareholders that maintenance of way costs up to 300l. per mile per annum? Gladly would they say Divide et impera-Make a good dividend and rule over us-to any railway chieftain who would stay this evil." Our author, it will be perceived, is facetious as well as practical and philosophical.

Mr. Adams has a theory that the development of the railway system will put an end, in a great measure, to the evils consequent on division of labour, by allowing operatives to move about the country, and encouraging them, like American labourers, to change every few years their occupations and places of abode, instead of remaining at one work, in one centre of industry, all their days.

The argument is pretty and specious, but we grieve to say not convincing. We cannot see that the perfection in skill, which alone commands the market, can be attained by change of labour. It is true that an author often obtains as much relief by change of employment as by rest. Phrenologists have long ago remarked this, and accounted for it; but a lifetime is now barely sufficient to perfect oneself in any one branch of knowledge. We do not talk now of a naturalist, except by courtesy; a man must be a zoologist, an entomologist, or a botanist; he cannot stand high in all three. Still, there is a medium in all things. The Turcoman's wife and the Kashmirian matron can attend to pastoral and tent, or household duties, while the one weaves her carpets and felts, and the other shawls; and we do not see why the factory population should be fit for only one duty in life. It is probable that their moral and physical beings would be very much benefited by an occasional change. We are sure the prospects of the country would be benefited by it. Albeit then we do not see that the facility of transport afforded by railways is as yet having much or any tendency that way, we cordially join in the hope that it may have that effect ultimately, and be the means of relieving the overgrown factory populations of certain districts.

We are apt to regard our modern railways as an invention produced by one individual mind. It is almost considered a heresy to doubt it. But Mr. Adams tells us that nothing is more certain than that the railway, as we at present possess it, is a compound of successive contrivances by many individual men. It did not start, like Pallas Athene, fully armed from the head of Jupiter. It was a process precisely akin to that of a traveller patching from time to time the soles of his shoes as they wear by the roughness of the road. It was a necessary growth of the digging and transportation of minerals, coal and metallic ores, to furnaces and seaports :

As

When the pack-saddle was set aside, and wheels adopted, it was not long before impassable ruts were formed, and were filled in from time to time with any material that lay most convenient, brushwood or stones; and planks, such as navvies use to this day for their barrows, were still more convenient. the waggons were apt to run off the planks at curves, it became necessary to border them with rising edges to keep the wheels in track. And then came the difficulty of the wear of the planks beneath the wheels. To prevent this wear they were ultimately treated like the wheels themselves-covered with strakes

of iron. This led the way to the tramways of iron, a hard narrow trammelled surface, not permitting great speed on account of the breakage of the cast-iron, and ultimately both cast-iron wheels and cast-iron trams were contrived to suit each other. We hear of them first about the year 1630, constructed of timber, and in 1760 both rails and wheels were made of iron where work was hard.

The steam locomotive-the essential of our modern railway locomotionhad its birth on the common road; brought forth from the brains of Murdoch and Trevethick, in England, though brains both in Switzerland and France had seethed at the same work, and the Lorrainer, Cugnot, is the first on record stated to have made a practical machine, albeit one that would not work. Blenkinsop, one of our northern men, in 1811, made practical locomotives to haul coal up steep ascents, by means of a rack attached to one rail, with a toothed propelling-wheel working into it, and thus securing adhesion. And it was subsequently found that the adhesion of plain wheels was quite sufficient with moderate ascents. The tooth and rack system was thus lost sight of, though no doubt available for many useful purposes, and some day to be revived with more perfect structure.

So iron rails, and wheels, and locomotive engines had, by the working of many trains and consecutive contrivances, been made practical facts, before, in the year 1814, George Stephenson made an improved locomotive engine, with more contrivances added to it. It is not only in regard to the invention of the locomotive that Mr. Adams takes up a decidedly adverse position to Mr. Smiles and other historians, but he laughs at the misplaced enthusiasm of his biographer when adverting to the circumstance of Stephenson having made Dr. Buckland aware that the sun's rays were remotely the cause of the locomotive's progress on the railway, because the sun's rays were engaged in the first condensation of the carbon which afterwards became coal:

Philosophy-"all vegetation" says

Is but a hoarding up of the sun's rays.

And Mr. Smiles remarks thereon: "The idea was, certainly, a most striking and original one: like a flash of light it illuminated, in an instant, an entire field of science." It did nothing of the kind; it was the mere playfulness of a practical with an abstract philosopher, and had no application whatever beyond that of a remote and fanciful juxta-position of ideas.

Mr. Adams traces the failure of the first steam omnibus on common roads to opposition and to the want of more vehicles, and of water and fuel stations. But a change, he says, is coming on:

Steam, which began its utilitarian career as water-pumper for miners, has long since become a farm-labourer. Portable engines, which some few years back counted by twos and threes, now count by thousands. Beginning by being merely portable, these farm-engines are now becoming locomotive, have learned to lay down their own rails, and, like tame elephants, they can disport themselves over ploughed fields and plough them, and climb over lumps and clods, pass over railway sleepers with the rails omitted, and drag cannon through morasses, and yet become ordinary engines when required to thrash corn, and pump water, and saw timber, and chop straw, and cut hay, and every kind of work that may be wanted, at the same time gradually converting mere clodhoppers into skilled mechanics.

Long it cannot be ere our suburban roads and our country roads will have iron rails inserted in their surfaces, over which locomotives with small wheels will work in hilly districts, and locomotives with larger wheels on more level districts. George Stephenson was right in preferring iron to gravel for road

surfaces; right in preferring levels to inclines; but, notwithstanding, it is good to have the iron surface to the inclined road where the traffic is small, till such time as the increased traffic will pay for levelling. The great trunk lines need feeders, and the branches of nature's trees are ever smaller than the trunks. When the time shall come that the roads leading to our farms and pastures shall be all iron lines, fuel and materials of all kinds will permeate the bye as well as the high roads, and a general mechanical education of the farm-labourers will raise them more in the scale than the labourers of manufacturing towns. The squalid huts will pass away and be no more, the easy means of transit will unlock the latent faculties, and the labour both of townsmen and countrymen will be convertible to either locality. Steam has been hitherto a worker only for the general public, or for the purposes of production; but steam or some other form of heat has yet to be converted to all kinds of domestic purposes, whereby drudgery-the application of men and women to mere slave-labour-will become extinct.

The question of fish-bellied parallel and double-beaded rails, of castchairs and cross-sleepers, of broad and narrow gauge, and fish joints, is of far too professional a character for discussion here: so also with regard to stations, bridges, and works of art, in which we take an interest, as we do in the progress of railways, the more so as they are permanent structures; but the questions, connected with which, whether in regard to style or materials used, are of an almost purely professional character. It is the same with regard to the "moving stock," which, it would scarcely be believed by the uninitiated in such matters, is a term which has been subjected to much criticism. Captain Huish, the manager of the London and North-Western, called it "rolling stock." The question at issue thus became whether the stock was rolled or moved along. A wheel proper moves by rolling, but the wheels on rails do not roll; a sledge, on the other hand, moves without rolling, but the wheels on rails move partly with a rolling and partly with a sledging motion-so, although the stock is neither a rolling stock nor a sledging stock, all that can be said of it is, that it is a "moving stock."

It is not very satisfactory to find our author, after discussing the mechanical causes of accidents on railways, arriving at the conclusion that in the present condition of traffic on the great metropolitan railways accidents involving loss of life must infallibly be on the increase, whatever may be done in mechanical improvement respecting them. The present imperfect condition of railway conveyance is also a cause of ill-health. "The sitting posture," Mr. Adams remarks, "which induces paralysis in literary men, possibly by the compression of their blood-vessels and retardation of the circulation which induces cold feet, must be much exaggerated by the incessant vibration of a carriage." There is also an unwholesome effect produced upon the brain, both by vibration and by the rapidity with which objects succeed to one another, as also, possibly, by the mere rapidity of transit through space, to which some organisations are more sensitive than others. Mr. Adams makes some valuable suggestions towards ameliorating this condition of things by means of exclusive passenger lines, with a better class of vehicles, having ventilation, space, and every convenience, with increased speed; and he adds:

Whether this is worth doing now-whether England and France have advanced sufficiently far in civilisation, and wealth, and the value of time-whether it is worth while to bring Madrid within fifteen hours of Paris and twenty-three hours from London, and Cadiz within thirty hours from London, and thus materially diminish the sea-distance to Panama as the highway to Australia

English shareholders probably entertain a notion that in a despotic country, and in case of war, there would be no security for their property lying at the mercy of wild Arabs. This is a fallacy. The wild Arab is essentially a merchant, a buyer and seller, as much so as a Hebrew ; and he only levies black-mail upon travellers because he has no trading resources. The Arab is a man of energy and quick wit, who can work mechanically if he can get mechanical work to do, and he is the very man to deal in transit. It is quite clear that if a railway were to be made, turning the Arabs out of work and depriving them of their rightstheir black-mail-it would be a cause of feud, and stealing rails, and doing mischief of all kinds; but if these same Arabs were made the police of the line, they would be at once converted from foes to friends, and would take good care that no one should injure or interfere with the line that furnished them with their salt. The Arabs, in fact, would become the workmen of the line, and grow as familiar as ourselves with rails and locomotives.

All this is theory, the capitalists would say, we must first see a line in practice. How can this be done experimentally?

There would not be much difficulty about it without any guarantee from the English government. One of the first processes in making a railway is to lay down a temporary line, along which the materials may be conveyed. This embraces rails, sleepers, and points, and crossings, and ballast-engines, and may be estimated at from six to nine hundred pounds per mile. For a thousand pounds per mile it would be practicable to lay down a light railway and to work it by light engines. It may be remembered that at the outset the Suez route was traversed by vehicles drawn by horses, without a rail, and this gave rise ultimately to the railway. Now the distance from the shore of the Bay of Antioch to the town of Antioch is only twenty miles, and this twenty miles could be laid down with a light railway for waggons carrying half a ton per wheel, at a cost of 20,000. This, at no great risk, would test the business capacity and safety of the country. If found to answer, the line could be continued to Aleppo, and thence to the head navigation of the Euphrates. This would be quite sufficient to commence the traffic, and the railway would follow with certainty. The light rails laid down would then serve to form branches and feeders.

Time was that Syria and Asia Minor were the abodes of opulence and civilisation, and they would be so again with facility and cheapness of transit. It is the especial aptitude of England to bring this thing to pass.

Most earnestly do we hope that Mr. Adams may turn out a true prophet. Notwithstanding the long delay that has taken place in entering upon the proposed communication with India, and the opening of a vast extent of territory so promising in every respect for the cultivation of cotton as the alluvial plains of Babylonia, Chaldæa, and Susiana, we are happy to have it in our power to say that there are still hopes of the project becoming a reality. The Sublime Porte is willing to raise the amount of security on capital expended in an object which cannot but tend to promote the prosperity and security of the empire, and give a new movement to its populations; and it is to be hoped that our own government will not in the presence of the projected canals in Nicaragua and at Suez refuse, at the dictation of the imperial projector of those two great schemes, that guarantee to a direct railway communication with India, which its importance in a commercial, military, and political point of view so fully entitle it.

A last chapter on railways as a national defence contains many not less suggestive notions than its predecessors. Proceeding upon the basis that rapidity in movement is an important element in fighting battles, Mr. Adams first advocated the adoption of what he designates as moving