GLEANINGS 
IN 
SCIENCE. 
JV o. 12 — December, 1829. 
1. On the Introduction of the Iron Chain Suspension Bridge into the 
Himmaldya Mountains. 
Those of your readers who have visited our hill provinces to the north-west, 
scarcely require to be told, that they constitute, perhaps, the most rugged aud 
difficult country in the world. The difficulties of intercommunication are in- 
deed very great, and no doubt, oppose a serious obstacle to the improvement 
of the people. In the Alps of Europe, which naturally are, probably, not much 
better, there yet have been formed magnificent roads in various directions, so as 
to render the labour of traversing the country comparatively easy, and thus to 
unite places apparently separated by nature. There arches of stone facilitate the 
passage from one precipice to another ; bridges convey the traveller over, other- 
wise, impassable torrents ; and where the nature of the rock forbids the attempt 
to construct a road, galleries are excavated through the very body of the 
mountain, and by a safe, though dark and dismal transit, render passable routes, 
where nature had seemed to fix an insurmountable barrier. In our northern 
mountains, again, with a few trifling exceptions, all is as it came from the hand of 
nature. Yet the Alps of Europe cannot be put in competition for value with 
our mountain provinces. They owe these improvements, rather to tiic circum- 
stance of t heir being the high road into one of the finest countries in Europe, than 
to any settled plan of improvement, or to any well understood view of developing 
the resources of the country. Schemes of conquest, and projects of ambition 
have, perhaps, oftener prompted such works (and this in every country) than 
the more useful calculations of the political economist. But whatever the mo- 
tives, the works arc a positive gain : the destruction of the barrier against invasion, 
being more than compensated for by the increased facility of communication 
with the neighbouring countries. The sword will yet, it is to be hoped, be 
stayed in its ravages, by obstacles more difficult to be surmounted than “ Alp or 
Appennine and in the mean time, the mutual intercourse of nations, as it 
affords to suffering humanity the principal solace for its destructive rage, so 
will it be mainly instrumental in forwarding that state of things in which, (if the 
prophecy be ever literally fulfilled,) “ the swords shall be converted into plough 
shares, and the spears into pruning hooks.” 
Facility of communication within itself, and with neighbouring countries, is 
certainly one of the first steps in the improvement of a nation. What rank the 
people of our mountain provinces would have held in the scale of wealth and 
civilization, if their country had been more accessible, and they less shut up 
in their rugged hills, it were vain to conjecture ; but it may safely be said, that a 
country with such resources could not have remained stationary at so low an 
ebb under such circumstances. With one of the finest climates in the world as 
it regards health ; with a soil certainly not below the average, and having the 
great advantage of a cheap irrigation ; with so many valuable natural produc- 
tions, both vegetable and mineral ; there seems only wanting improved means of 
intercourse within itself, and with the neighbouring countries of Thibet and 
Iiindoostan, to raise it far above its present level. With a surface equal to 
nearly half of England ; with such a range of cultivated productions as the vine, 
wheat, rice, hemp, flax, cotton, sugar, and opium ; with copper, lead and iron 
mines ; with inexhaustible forests, that include almost every production of the 
tropics or the temperate zone, the bamboo, the oak, the cedar (probably the 
