THE STEAM-ENGINE. 



527 



THE STEAM-ENGINE. 



(FIFTH LECTURE.) 



Capital and labor have for the last twenty years been directed with extra- 

 ordinary skill and energy to the improvement of inland transport, and this 

 important element of national prosperity and civilization has received a pro- 

 portionate impulse. Effects are now witnessed, which, had they been even 

 hinted at as being within the compass of possibility twenty years ago, would 

 have been scouted as the dreams of a disordered imagination ; such, indeed, 

 as no writer of fiction would have dared to give place to. Even so recently as 

 twenty-five years since, who would have credited the possibility of a ponder- 

 ous machine, weighing some twenty tons, carrying with it several tons of coal 

 and water, flying over the country at the rate of fifty, or sixty, or seventy 

 miles an hour, transporting some hundreds of passengers with their luggage ! 

 Yet such a spectacle is now of such ordinary occurrence in England, as to 

 excite no astonishment. And the art of constructing the machinery by which 

 these extraordinary results are obtained is so far from having reached maturity, 

 that scarcely two practical men can be found to agree upon the mechanical 

 conditions which shall best insure its efficiency. At the moment I address 

 you, commissions have been confided in England and elsewhere to the most 

 eminent scientific and practical men, to ascertain by actual experiment what 

 these conditions are ! So complete was the ignorance of the powers of loco- 

 motion by steam which prevailed, even among engineers, previous to the open- 

 ing of the Liverpool railway, that the transport of heavy goods was regarded 

 as the chief object of the undertaking, and its principal source of revenue. 

 The incredible speed of transport, effected even in the very first experiments 

 in 1830, burst upon the public, and on the scientific world, with all the effect 

 of a new and unlooked-for phenomenon. On the unfortunate occasion which 

 deprived the British nation of Mr. Huskisson, the wounded body of that states- 

 man was transported a distance of about fifteen miles in twenty-five minutes, 

 being at the rate of thirty-six miles an hour. The revenue of the road arising 



