Yol. I. 
ALBANY, MARCH, 1853. 
No. III. 
Progress of Improvement. 
ERT AIN characteristics 
have marked nearly every 
age of the world. The pe¬ 
culiarity of the present cen* 
tury, as every one knows, 
is rapid improvement in 
physical sciences and useful 
arts. Take the art of traveling as an instance- 
forty years ago, the same modes of locomotion 
were in use that existed in the days of Homer— 
horses, chariots, sailing vessels. Middle-aged men 
can remember when a three day’s voyage in a 
sloop from Hew-York to Albany, was not regarded 
as slow traveling. The fleetest English mail 
coaches in 1825, did not exceed in swiftness the 
ancient chariot races at the Olympic games. 
Now, all at once, right under our own eyes, an 
invention has sprung up and been perfected, which 
wilt carry a thousand people across the face of the 
country, and leave the chasing tempest behind. 
About ten thousand miles of railway have been 
made in the United States, and more than this in 
Europe. About three thousand steamboats are 
plowing American waters. 
If some Rip Van Winkle of the days of young 
George the Third, could have slept an eighty years 
nap, and opened his eyes in these first weeks of 
1858, he would have seen wonders all about him., 
which had they been predicted at that time, would 
have stamped any one with the wildest insanity. 
He would behold vessels of enormous size, and 
without sail or oar, stemming the tide of our lar¬ 
gest rivers, or sweeping under bare poles the face 
of the ocean; huge carriages, holding sixty men 
each, thundering through all parts of the world 
with the swiftness of eagles; bridges, hung on 
wires, spanning mighty chasms, and vast rivers; 
men, a thousand miles apart, holding familiar con¬ 
verse with each other, as if face to face; artists, 
painting with the flash of sunbeams; newsmen, 
writing with the lighting; and, not contented with 
his ordinary range on the surface of the earth, 
man rising on wings of hydrogen and riding on 
the wind or soaring through the clouds. 
These bold and surprising results are scarcely 
more remarkable than other equally useful 
and less obtrusive inventions. The cotton-mill 
laborer has gained two hundred fold in the amount 
of goods produced; explorations in mining are re¬ 
duced to great precision through geology; the en¬ 
gineer knows the exact strength of his structure 
before the first stone or timber is laid; cumbersome 
oil-lamps for lighting cities have been wholly dis¬ 
placed by the clear dazzling flame of a stream of 
gas; printing-presses throw off*ten thousand copies 
an hour; huge steam engines, working with their 
hundred arms through vast factories, perform by 
their perpetual throb,the labor of thousands of men. 
These wonderful improvements, which in the 
space of half a century have wrought such a 
mighty change on one-half of the surface of this 
old earth, and which have been effected chiefly 
through the triumphs of science, have very natu¬ 
rally led many to suppose that improvements 
equally astonishing might be made in the great 
art of agriculture, if science were only applied to 
this as it has been to other arts. Beautiful theories 
have been erected; minute directions have been 
framed in the laboratory and in the closet, which 
farmers were to follow out, with confident expec¬ 
tations of golden results, and a great revolution 
was thought to be very closely at hand. But these 
theories, and these directions, although claiming 
the most eminent chemists as their originators and 
endorsers, when subjected to practice, were found 
to be utter failures, and the beautiful promises 
which went before them, proved as delusive as the 
flattering mirage to the fainting traveler. Such 
things, it must be confessed, are not a little dis¬ 
heartening; but they were the natural results of 
superficial reasoning. The great laboratory of na- 
ture, where months are required to effect chemi¬ 
cal changes, and where these changes are con¬ 
stantly influenced, arrested, and even reversed, 
