772 
part of a month at best and was considered 
a greater hardship than a journey to India 
or China now. ‘Then, the wind furnished 
the sole motive power for the ships of the 
ocean, and a voyage took as many weeks as 
now it does days. A hundred years ago 
the great canals were not built (one making 
the route to India as short as was formerly 
the distance to the half-way point—the 
Cape of Good Hope); nor monolithic light- 
houses erected along the coasts for the safety 
of ocean voyagers. Then a building three 
stories in height was unusual; now a six- 
teen-story building isnot uncommon. The 
century has seen. the chaise give place to 
the horse-car and this to the cable, and 
finally the electric car with its speedy ser- 
vice brings the office within easy reach of 
the suburban residence. 
The military engineer, while still trained 
and ready to engage in the fiercest shock 
of battle, has also developed plans of hasty 
works to accelerate transportation and the 
march, to make practicable the temporary 
entrenchments of the battlefield or the 
more permanent works of encampment and 
the siege ; and he has perfected to a high 
degree the many stupendous works of per- 
manent fortification and defense. While 
in the preceding century architecture was 
considered a branch of engineering,* yet 
in the century just closed they have been 
definitely divorced. 
The mine engineer has developed 
methods and perfected details, until the 
total yield of mineral wealth now each 
year exceeds a thousand millions of dollars, 
while a hundred years ago it was but a 
modicum. Copper has been needed for 
electric purposes and the arts, and he has 
driven adits and shafts, drifts and tunnels, 
until some regions are honeycombed in the 
search for the metal to depths exceeding a 
mile. The same watchful enterprise char- 
* Vide ‘Science des ingenieurs,’ Belidor, Paris, 
1729. 
SCIENCE. 
[N.S. Vou. XIII. No. 333. 
acterizes the search for other metals. But 
by far the most important products of the 
mine are coal, devoting over seven hundred 
million tons a year to the countless uses of 
commercial and industrial life, and more 
than seventy million tons per annum of 
iron and steel, whose services in the cen- 
tury’s developments are preeminent. 
The marine engineer has developed not 
only the speed of ocean vessels as noted, 
but their safety and size as well, develop- 
ing a marvel of steel construction that will 
contain the lading of a score of barks of a 
hundred years ago and carry a small city 
of people across the seas with a safety all 
but perfect. Less than a hundred years 
ago the first successful steamboat was built, 
of 4 H. P. and steaming at a rate of seven 
miles per hour; now the tonnage of our 
great steamships reaches 16,000, with a 
H. P. of 37,000,a length of more than 
seven hundred feet and a speed of twenty- 
seven miles per hour, while some military 
steamboats attain an hourly speed exceed- 
ing forty miles. A century ago the ton- 
nage of steamships was naught; now this 
yearly addition to the commerce of the 
world is more than two million tons. Since 
the days of the Clermont and the Savannah, 
the marine engineer has been applying new 
discoveries and evolving improvements, 
slowly at first and then with increasing 
success, until the perfected steel giants of 
to-day cost about four million dollars each, 
instead of twelve thousand dollars for the 
sailing vessel of a century ago. And now 
there are more than fourteen thousand 
steamships in the world aggregating nearly 
twenty million tons register—a great 
world’s fleet that, steaming abreast, would 
cover a width of a hundred miles. 
The electrical engineer, within the latter 
portion of the century, has developed a field 
felt in all phases of practical progress, rang- 
ing from the inauguration of the telegraph 
of the mid-century and the submarine cable 
