1864. | Samugnson on Steam Navigation. 235 
cometary ; they would surround the sun very closely for nearly half 
its circumference ; and if their common perihelion should occur in or 
near the longitude which the earth has in December, a preponderance 
of spots in the antumn and winter months would be far from im- 
probable. 
Our ring might lie in the plane of the ecliptic or near it, and so 
might intersect the orbit of the Harth, or Venus, or Jupiter. Of the 
influence of such intersection we may conjecture much, but can discern 
nothing distinctly ; and our readers may be disposed to think that we 
have advanced far enough already into the regions of conjecture. 
STEAM NAVIGATION, ITS RISE, PROGRESS, AND 
PROSPECTS. 
By Martin Samvrtson, Member of the Institute of Civil Engineers. 
Tr seldom occurs to the active minds engaged in the consideration 
of man’s age, and his relations to the lower animals, that, in order to 
arrive at accurate conclusions upon these subjects, it is necessary, not 
only to study the traces he has left behind him in the earth’s strata, 
and the history of his recent physical development, but also to direct 
the attention to the method in which he has executed plans that seem 
to have been prompted by some superhuman—nay, why need we hesi- 
tate to say—Divine agency. 
How does it happen that throughout the thousands of years in the 
historic record, as well as in the ages before the supposed date of his 
creation, during which we are now taught to believe that man existed 
in dark ignorance, not the remotest idea appears to have occurred to 
him of the practicability of rendering the physical forces subservient 
to his will; and that up to the commencement of the present century, 
his utmost attainments were unable to rescue him from the power of 
the elements? For it is only an affair of yesterday that he was bound 
to go or stay, to lie becalmed or be driven he knew not whither across 
the boundless main, as it pleased the volition of the tempest. 
And again, dismissing for the present the consideration of the 
marvellous strides which were made in the new locomotive enterprise 
after it was once fairly started, is it not a matter for reflection, as we 
look abroad over the nations of the earth, to find perhaps side by side 
with the Leviathan (for it is more than probable that she may one day 
be ploughing her way across the Pacific Ocean) the hollowed-out trunk 
of a tree, the primitive boat, filled with naked savages and propelled 
by paddles which, with the boat itself, may have been shaped by means 
of the serrated bone of some predaceous fish ? 
Who will venture, with such a contrast before his eyes to-day, to 
assert that man—that is, reasoning man—is not a creature of yesterday ? 
It appears to us to be the Creator’s intention, just as He has pre- 
served for us the fossil remains of extinct species of animals, in order 
