THE WONDERFUL CENTURY. 



PART L SUCCESSES. 

 CHAPTER I. 



MODES OF TRAVELLING. 



Put forth your force, my iron horse, with limbs that never tire ! 

 The best of oil shall feed your joints, and the best of coal your fire ; 

 Like a train of ghosts, the telegraph posts go wildly trooping by, 

 While one by one the milestones run, and off behind us fly ! 

 Dash along, crash along, sixty miles an hour ! 



Right through old England flee ! 

 For I am bound to see my love, 

 Far away in the North Countrie. 



Professor Rankine. 



men of the nineteenth century have not been 

 slow to praise it. The wise and the foolish, the learned 

 and the unlearned, the poet and the pressman, the rich 

 and the poor, alike swell the chorus of admiration for 

 the marvellous inventions and discoveries of our own 

 age, and especially for those innumerable applications 

 of science which now form part of our daily life, and 

 which remind us every hour of our immense superiority 

 over our comparatively ignorant forefathers. 



But though in this respect (and in many others) we 

 undoubtedly think very well of ourselves, yet, in the 

 opinion of the present writer, our self-admiration does 

 not rest upon an adequate appreciation of the facts. No 



