MECHANICS AND USEFUL ARTS. 39 



fall back until it roaches the hindermost. Ages may elapse before 

 tliis is done, or can be done while barbarism endures. Flint imple- 

 ments continued in use through ages .of bronze; and iron has not yet 

 reached all savage tribes. That the rapid transit of men and merchan- 

 dise is an important, and destined to become a leading element in civ- 

 ilization, no one can doubt who observes its influence on the social, 

 political, commercial, and intellectual world. If it stands still, pro- 

 gress in other departments must be arrested. Whatever may be the 

 extreme limits to speed, there is little risk in asserting that the pres- 

 ent mean rate will in time be deemed intolerably slow. It is not 

 every one that is now satisfied with it, and the number is not small who 

 wish it were doubled. 



When faith in progress becomes general, improvements in the arts 

 will become common. The more there is of it, the less of that de- 

 pressing unbelief which meets new projects, sometimes with derision, 

 always with suspicion, and against which valuable novelties have to 

 struggle into life. Preferring to rest satisfied with tilings as they are, 

 it is doubtless ready to ask what possibility there is of any marked ad- 

 vance in traveling by steam P and where the necessity for it ? The 

 very objections to mail coaches in the last century, which were to pass 

 over roads good and bad, night and day, afc the incredible average 

 rate of ten miles an hour ; to the first steamboats, also, which, if they 

 did not threaten to upset and break the limbs of their passengers, 

 would subject them to the double risk of being scalded to death, or 

 blown piecemeal into the air. Had the leap from ten miles by horses, 

 to fifty by steam, been attempted at once, it would have staggered the 

 boldest, and probably have brought public execration on the proposer ; 

 but nothing of the kind can take place. By the law of progress, im- 

 provements are gradual, never precipitate. 



The timid would not now willingly be among the first to travel at 

 the rate of 80 or 100 miles an hour, if they even had little fear of its 

 talcing away their breath. The feeling is a natural one, and therefore 

 to be respected, although it has no rational foundation. It is chiefly 

 ascribable to ignorance of the fact that the highest speed no more af- 

 fects our bodily organs, than the lowest. 



Passengers in the cabin of a ship flying before the wind, have no 

 more sensation of going forward, than when she is lying at anchor. 

 A balloon rushing upward, or in a lateral direction, appears to the 

 aeronauts stationary and motionless. In night rail trains we walk to 

 and fro, sit and sleep, unconscious of progression as in a parlor or 

 bedroom. In daytime it is the same if we close our eyes to objects 

 outside. Jolts from obstructions and irregularities of roads, with 

 changes of direction and diversities of speed, tell us we are moving. 

 In a perfect system of travel, there could be no sense of motion at all, 

 whether the rate was one mile an hour, or a hundred, or five hundred. 

 And even that is a snail's pace when we look, and we ought often to 

 look, beyond our pelt}- doings to those of the Great Engineer. Our 

 earth is one of a line of passenger cars that conveys us through space 

 at a mean velocity of 68,000 miles an hour, without disturbing a loose 

 brick on a chimney, or displacing a grain of dust, proclaiming the fact 

 that uniformity of motion is equivalent to rest, and suggesting that 

 as with time and eternity, heat and cold, light and darkness, attrac- 



