ways in the nineteenth. Unlimited capabilities for the transmission of correspondence are now afforded to the mail service: 347,000,000 letters were conveyed and delivered in 1850-an almost fivefold increase since 1839. With a celerity and regularity not less remarkable than beneficent the orders of government, calls of trade, messages of love and friendship, tidings of joy and sorrow, of all the hopes and aims, doubts and fears, which actuate a family or community, are despatched to every county and to every town and village in the land, verifying on the grandest scale the truth that all is 'toil co-operant to an end.'

Enlarged experience has improved or modified the details of railway construction and management, and has made available many aids and appliances of which the need had not been foreseen. The old 'fish-bellied' rail has been discarded for one straight and heavier; thirty-five pounds to the yard being too light for the increasing weight of traffic, seventy-five pounds to the yard is that now most in use. Taking the miles of railway in round numbers at 7000 miles, the weight of iron laid down in rails alone would thus amount to 3,696,000,000 lbs., or 1,605,357 tons; in the manufacture of which, as well as of the iron chairs, switches, girders, and columns brought into use by railway constructions, thousands of hands have been employed, and the metallic branch of our national industry largely developed. Balks of wood are found preferable to blocks of stone as sleepers; improved chairs and the substitution of hollow-wrought iron wedges for those of compressed wood facilitate the laying, and increase the stability of the rails; and in some instances, said to be successful, the rails are fixed to iron sleepers by a contrivance that dispenses with the use of chairs or other intermediate support. Signals, crossings, turn-tables; all are improved-in most instances substituting the simple for the complex; and where accidents have occurred in their use, the fault lies not with the apparatus, but with those who have charge of it.

Experiment has furnished data on which the frictional and atmospheric resistances to a train in motion may be calculated, and the most economical principles deduced. Many interesting facts have been brought to light illustrative of the laws which regulate weight at high velocities, and of those affecting speed by departure from a true level. The studious mathematician has enabled the engineer to determine beforehand the nature of his constructions, the strength of his boilers, the energies of his steam. Guess - work, in fact, has had to give place to the exactitude of real

science.

The chemist, too, has lent his aid. Great expense was formerly incurred in removing at stated intervals the incrustation deposited by the water on the inside of boilers, where its accumulation was a source of positive injury and loss of power. The diffusion of a small quantity of muriate of ammonia with the water was suggested as a remedy, and being tried in an engine on the South-Western Railway, at the end of five weeks, on opening the boiler, not a particle of incrustation appeared, nor was there any deterioration of the metal. The explanation is, that as soon as ebullition commences the ammonia seizes upon the carbonate of lime contained in the water and converts it into carbonate of ammonia, which then escapes with the steam. By this means hundreds of pounds are saved annually in the repairing of

boiler-tubes.

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To carry passengers without interruption to the farthest point of their journey, irrespective of the lines over which they passed, was a necessity that increased with every increase of the railway system. To meet certain practical difficulties which it involved, the clearing system' was adopted by the different companies concerned. This system is one well known to bankers, who use it daily in the settlement of their business transactions with one another. A central clearing-house' was established in London, to which a daily account is sent from each of the allied stations—comprehending nearly the whole of those north of London-containing a statement of the number of passengers that travelled through; of parcels received or transmitted; of goods, cattle, private carriages, railway vehicles retained or forwarded-in short, of all details of the traffic. These are classified, and the various debits and credits indicated by columns written in red or black ink, including the proportion of passenger-tax payable to government by each company; and thus the several liabilities having been ascertained, the payment of a few hundreds of pounds in balances, instead of the interpayment of thousands, serves to settle the whole.

Railway insurance, too, is another result of the railway system: a resource which, if it had been thought of in the days of stage-coaches, would have failed because of the fewness of travellers. For threepence a first-class traveller may insure his life for £1000, for any journey whether long or short; for twopence a second-class traveller is promised £500; and for one penny the third-class traveller gets £200; or smaller sums for injuries which stop short of the destruction of life. Or the whole term of life may be insured by a single payment. Five, twenty-five, or forty-two shillings will respectively secure £100, £500, or £1000 to the insurer, let him travel whenever he may. This subject is well worthy of consideration by travellers, especially those whose means of existence might be stopped or diverted by any sudden casualty.

Stephenson's prize-engine, The Rocket, weighed six tons: locomotives now weigh from 30 to 40 tons. In how far this mighty agent of travel has been improved was shewn in the Great Exhibition, where at one side stood a row of ponderous and magnificent locomotives, finished, though so huge, with the precision of a watch, and seeming formidable in their silence. To speak of them in the present tense, The Liverpool, exhibited by the North-Western Company, is one of Crampton's patent-that is, with the driving-wheels at the rear instead of at the centre. It weighs 37 tons, and has a heating-surface of 2400 square feet. The Lord of the Isles, belonging to the Great Western Company, is a favourable specimen of the ordinary engines used on the broad-gauge line. Its weight is 35 tons, that of the tender when loaded with a ton and a half of coke and 1600 gallons of water, 18 tons—altogether 53 tons. The heating-surface is 1815 feet, with strength sufficient to bear a pressure of 120 lbs. to the inch. This engine is said to have drawn 120 tons at sixty miles an hour; the usual speed is, however, twenty-nine miles an hour with 90 tons, and a consumption of 21 lbs. of coke to the mile.

Besides these, there was a locomotive by Hawthorn, with improved springs, which keep the bearing on the wheels at all times equal, a steamchamber inside instead of outside the boiler, and considered equal to a speed of eighty miles an hour. There were specimens, too, of light engines

and light carriages for branch-lines or light traffic, and not less swift than some of their heavier competitors.

These instances may serve to convey an idea of the capabilities of recentlyconstructed locomotives; their velocity of at times seventy or eighty miles an hour may be increased when stronger materials or modes of construction shall be discovered. A cannon ball in its swiftest flight travels four times faster only than the seventy-miles-an-hour express train. The phenomena of passing objects observed during such rapid locomotion are most remark able:-The steam fills and leaves the cylinder twenty times in a second; twenty times in a second the piston advances and returns, and the outblow of steam sounds as a continuous whiz, so inappreciable are the intervals between the rapid strokes. The driving-wheels, eight feet in diameter, revolve five times in a second, and at every beating of a clock the mighty engine dashes over thirty-five yards of ground!

How various and numerous are the sources of the great results which we have been considering! Here an idea, there a conception has been formed; attempt followed, and the failure of one has proved the success of another. Railway bars and telegraph wires are aiding in a great work: out of them grow ever-new endeavours and capabilities; and it would be rash to say where improvement shall stop, or to assume that we have reached perfection, or that knowledge shall not be increased.

Speeding to and fro, the railway train is an agent of good-a representative of great and persevering thought, of earnest skill and hardy enterprise.

In the deep silence of the night, or the calm of a summer noon, the thoughtful listener may fancy the swift breath of the locomotive to be the panting of a time eager for its advent-in haste to open a brighter era. Yet the coming depends on our own advance; and such as we make it will the time ever be:

For we see that through the ages one increasing purpose runs,

And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns.'

THE INCAS OF PERU.

IN

N a former Paper, treating of the ancient monuments of America, allusion was made to the melancholy which takes possession of the mind while contemplating the remains of a civilisation the sources of which have entirely dried up, and between which and the civilisation that has superseded it there is not the most distant link. But though such be the position of the aboriginal civilisation of America as regards the races that have succeeded the Indians in the dominion of their native territory, in the history of the human mind the mental development of no race of men holds an isolated position; and the more independent of collateral influences is the development of any one branch of the human family, the more important and the more interesting will its manifestations be as relates to that history. The new book of world-knowledge opened by the discovery of America has as yet been but imperfectly read, but there is much hope that when better known it will help to solve some of the most curious philosophical historical problems. Irrespective of such deep questions, there is, however, much to interest us in the bygone civilisation of the Indians, and particularly in that of the Peruvian empire, where a system of government existed which is still looked up to by some as the great desideratum for all countries, and which has never elsewhere been tried on so grand a scale or carried out with so much consistency. It is true that in our democratic times the partisans of paternal governments,' or even 'hero governments,' have considerably diminished in number; yet that strong government centralisation, and that despotic equalisation of all individualities, which is in fact but an expansion of the same principle, with the substitution of a system for a man, has been a favourite theory with many. We do not of course pretend to say that the system of government in Peru was exactly similar to any of the utopian schemes of European genius; but there is sufficient resemblance between it and several of these to recall to us the occult affinities of the human mind.

When Pizarro landed in Peru with the intention of conquering for the Spanish crown the supposed El Dorado, which had so long evaded the searching eye of the Spanish treasure-seekers, the empire of the Incas-as the rulers of this country were called-extended along the shores of the Pacific from about 2° north latitude to 37° south latitude, comprising the kingdom of Quito and Northern Chili; the country being intersected

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throughout the whole length by the vast ridge of the Andes. This stupendous mountain-chain did not, however, on all points form the eastern boundary-line of the Peruvian empire, but was on the contrary embraced within its limits and made to partake of its civilisation. The strange mixture of sandy levels and precipitous mountain-steeps presented by the topography of the country seem indeed, more than anything else, to have stimulated the genius of that civilisation, and it was in its subjugation of these natural impediments that it was most strikingly manifested.

Striking, indeed, was the spectacle presented on the coasts of the Pacific to the eyes of the astonished Spaniards; for though they had so long fed their imaginations with exaggerated narratives, embodying the hopes and dreams of romantic adventurers, that they expected to discover in these unexplored regions countries where the rivers flowed in beds of gold, where sparkling gems strewed the sea-beaches, and where the waters of everlasting youth gushed forth from the rocks-yet they could hardly have been prepared to meet a social organisation and development, and a material civilisation such as that of Peru. They here beheld sandy deserts, which seemed doomed by nature to sterility, rendered fertile by the ingenious contrivances of man; and gigantic mountain-ranges broken by foaming torrents, by frightful precipices, and by yawning chasms, and apparently destined to form an impassable barrier between east and west, transformed by art into a highway of intercommunication, and made to rival the plains in productiveness; while the existence of large cities and numerous smaller towns* and villages, scattered not only over the plains and in the valleys, but clustering amidst luxuriant hedgerows and smiling gardens, on the mountain plateaus and all up the verdant sides of the Cordilleras, to the very limits of its eternal snows, bore further testimony to the flourishing condition of the country. The industry of the Peruvians had, by means of artificial irrigation, converted into fertile fields and rich pasture-lands the sandy plains extending between the ocean and the foot of the Andes, which were never refreshed by rain, and but scantily watered by a few mountain-torrents descending from the Cordilleras, whose mighty rivers all flow in the opposite direction. The waters, gathered in lakes in the mountain regions, were conducted through canals and subterraneous aqueducts, constructed on a vast scale and with considerable art and admirable patience, into these thirsty plains, the barren soils of which were farther enriched with the manure of sea-fowls, the same which, under the name of guano, has of late years played so great a part in European agriculture. The aqueducts-some of which measured between 400 and 500 miles in length, and for which a passage had sometimes to be contrived through massive rocks and across rivers and marshes-were constructed of large slabs of freestone, so nicely fitted together as to require no cement, and so scientifically placed as to be able to resist on the one side the

*Dr Robertson, rendered sceptical by the evident exaggeration in the accounts of Indian civilisation given by the early Spanish writers on the subject, was on his side induced to underrate this civilisation. Among other things, he maintains that "in all the dominions of the Incas, Cuzco was the only place that had the appearance or was entitled to the name of a city.' But since Dr Robertson wrote, archæological science has been busy among the remains of the primitive civilisation of America, and has discovered many facts which confirm its extent, and among these the sites and ruins of various towns of considerable dimensions.