ON THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE. 19 



Great Britain. One company lias even advertised for proposals for the 

 manufacture of the necessary cable. 



The distance between Galway and British America is not far from 

 1,600 miles. Galway is already connected with London and all the great 

 European towns by telegraphic lines. A company in New Brunswick has 

 undertaken to extend the wires which now reach from New York to Hali- 

 fax, as far as Cape Race, so as to leave nothing but the sub-oceanic line 

 to be finished. Can it be finished ? Is it practicable ? With all the objec- 

 tions duly weighed currents, icebergs, variable tempei*atures, whales and 

 what not is the balance of probabilities in favor of the scheme ? The 

 British Company certainly think so two years' safe working of the line 

 between the South Foreland and Sangatte, doubtless forming the ground 

 of conviction. 



The London Literary Gazette states, that the Rev. J. TV. Koelle, of the 

 Church Missionary Society, of England, has recently returned from Sierra 

 Leone, where he has made extensive investigations into the African lan- 

 guages. There are a great number of liberated negroes at that place, from 

 whom he has collected a comparative vocabulary of the languages of no 

 less that 190 different countries, from almost every part of Africa, which 

 will contain upwards of 100 distinct languages. Besides that, he has 

 written a grammar of the Vei language, and one of the highly developed 

 and most interesting Bornu language, which, together with the Fellah, 

 constitute the most important languages of Central Africa, The Bornu 

 grammar, it is believed, will throw new light on the character of the Afri- 

 can languages. We believe that these results, which constitute the most 

 comprehensive fund of philological information of that continent as yet 

 collected, are to be forthwith published, with a new ethnological map, 

 showing the localities of the various countries, a great proportion of which 

 have hitherto been unknown, even by name. 



Commissioner Bartlett, late of the Mexican Boundary Survey, has, by 

 the aid of the Indian vocabulary published by Mr. Galatin, recently dis- 

 covered that the harsh guttural language of the Apache Indians, our new 

 South Western border men, is the same dialect as the Athapescan of the 

 distant north shore of the American continent. Similar indications of 

 ancient emigration may be expected at every point. 



A review of the progress of mechanical, or any of the branches of phys- 

 ical science, during the past year, strikingly illustrate the fact, that many 

 important inventions and discoveries whose reality was made known years 

 ago, are but commencing an existence, through their practical application 

 to the wants of every -day life. In this work of time, the transformation of 

 that which was theoretically true into that which is practically useful, 

 there is great and wonderful progress. This progress is silent, unmarked 



