LOCOMOTION AND TRANSPORT. 



test part of the urban population circulates freely through the 

 country. This interfusion improves and civilises the rural 

 population. The highest intelligence will be occasionally found, 

 both in public and in private, diffusing knowledge and science in 

 the remotest villages. We cannot now take up a London journal 

 without observing announcements of men distinguished in the 

 various branches of knowledge and art, visiting the various towns 

 and villages of the provinces, and delivering their lectures on 

 science, and entertainments and exhibitions in the fine arts. So 

 rapid are the communications, that it is frequently announced that 

 this or that professor or artist will, on Monday evening, deliver a 

 lecture or entertainment in Liverpool, on Tuesday in Manchester, 

 on Wednesday in Preston, on Thursday in Halifax, on Friday in 

 Leeds, and so forth. 



28. Nor is this all. The aspirations of the present generation 

 after the spread of knowledge and the advancement of mind, unsatis- 

 fied with a celerity of transmission so rapid by the railway, which 

 literally has the speed of the wind, has provoked from human 

 invention still greater wonders. The Electric Telegraph for the 

 transmission of intelligence, in the most literal sense of the term, 

 annihilates both space and time. The interval which elapses 

 between the transmission of a message from London and its 

 delivery at Paris, Brussels, or Berlin, provided the line is unin- 

 terrupted, is absolutely inappreciable. 



This system is now spreading throughout the whole civilised 

 world. The United States of Am erica are overspread with a net- 

 work of electricity, The President's message delivered at Wash- 

 ington, was transmitted from thence to St. Louis, on the confines 

 of the state of Missouri, a distance of about 1200 miles, in an hour. 

 The news from Europe arriving at Boston by the Cunard steamers, 

 is often transmitted to New Orleans, over almost the entire terri- 

 tory of the United States from north to south, a distance of nearly 

 2000 miles, in less time than would be necessary to commit 

 it to paper. Even the small delay that now exists arises, not 

 from any imperfection in the instrument of transmission, but 

 merely from the line of electric communication being inter- 

 rupted from point to point, and transferred from one system 

 of telegraphs to another, at several intermediate stations. 

 After improvements shall remove such delays as these, we shall 

 probably see intelligence conveyed in an instant over a quadrant 

 of the globe. 



29. But if we would seek for a striking illustration of the effects 

 of the rapid transmission of intelligence by the combination of all 

 the various expedients supplied by science to art, it is in the practice 

 of Journalism that we are to look for them, and more especially in 



H 



