RAIL-ROADS. 547 



The Honesdale rail-road in Pennsylvania is kept open 

 through the winter. 



Notwithstanding such difficulties, however, the long 

 and well tried utility of canals, their superior facilities for 

 conveying heavy weights, which cannot readily be di- 

 vided, the passing from one level to another at a trifling 

 expense, will still give them honorable employment where 

 they have been or may be readily constructed. Like an 

 old and respected friend, they are not to be rudely pass- 

 ed, for a new and more fascinating acquaintance. 



It is a singular fact that the entire principle of the 

 railway was introduced into England long before canals, 

 if we except an unimportant cut of a mile or two mad 

 near Cambridge by the Romans. 



In some of the principal collieries in the north of Eng- 

 land, the use of the wooden rail for conveying coal car- 

 riages from the pit to the place of shipment, was adopted 

 as far back as 1076, and possibly thirty or forty years 

 prior to that time. It was not, however, till the celebrat- 

 ed joint stock year of 1825, that the subject excited 

 much interest, when the projection of a railway from 

 Manchester to Liverpool gave a new impulse, and the 

 effects appear to be working a complete revolution in the 

 business of locomotion. 



The railway and its adaptation for a moving power, 

 simple as it is in principle, is eminently a child of science 

 and the arts. The improvements which have from time 

 to time been adopted, and the inventions which have 

 added continually to its merits, have been long and grad- 

 ually overcoming the obstacles which this species of lo- 

 comotion presented. 



THE RAIL. 



We are not informed that any other country has claim- 

 ed with England the use of the railway until within a 

 few years. At its early adoption in 1G7G, two continued 

 wooden rails or strong pieces about four feet apart, were 



