The Sun.
London, England, 1829-10-26 00:00:00

the time was not materially slioitened. What a I
vast addition then would he inada to the present
amount of internal intercourse when the expense
is reduced three-fourths, and the time two-
thirds ; and when the mode of conveyance is as
superior in comfort to cur present starre-coaches,
as the coach is to the common cart? To all
the active classes, to a person especially who is
at the head of an extensive business, time is
,of
still more value than money. If the journey
from Edinburgh to Manchester could he per-
formed in ten hours, at an expellee of 14s. or
155., every merchant knows that the amount of
travelling between the two places would increase,
not ten, hut fifty fold l Journeys for pleasure
would multiply in as great a proportion as those
frr -l_Asiness; and we arc satisfied, that when we
'f:Tliby the advantage of railways and locomotive
engines on all our great thoroughfares, we shall
have, on a moderate estimate, twenty or thirty
times as much internal intercourse as we have at

peesentb
Wheel the !carriage of goods; which is now
Aet:t 9d. or 10d, a ton per mile by land, is re-
amed to 2d., and when, in point of speed, one
day does the work of four, the heaviest commo-
dities, such as corn, potatoes, coals, will bear
the expence of carriage for a hundred miles. 'the
result of this will be, that the expence of living
in great towns will be reduced, and the price of
raw produce will rise in remote parts of the
country. The facility, celerity, and cheapness of
internal intercourse, contribute more probably to
the advancement of civilization than all other cir-
cumstances put together. Sixty or seventy years
ago, the journey from Edinburgh to London oc-
cupied twenty days. At present, taking the
average of all the modes of conveyance by land
nd water, it ce:cupies three or four, and the
quantity of travelling has increased probably
twenty or thirty fold. Are we too sanguine in
anticipating another increase equally great, when
the time is reduced from three or four days
to twenty hours, the expePce almost in the same
proportion, and when the traveller is put in pos-
session of a much higher degree of ease and com-
fort ? Let the improvement we speak of be rea-
lized, let what was once a journey of twenty days
rtduce'.7( to one of as many hours, and we have
bOt a. doubt that we shall have five hundred times
as much travelling as we had in the year 1760.
In point of fact, when the time is reduced from
80 hours to 20, the result is exactly the same as
if Edinburgh were brought as near to London
as Leicester or Birmingham ; and, to pursue the
comparison, when the journey was one of 20
days, the effect was the same as if Edinburgh
had stood in Iceland. Besides, we must always
remember that the intercourse grows in a much
greater ratio than the distance is shortened. \To-
mines might be written without exhausting the
materials for speculation arising out of such a
change. To use our own words, when writing
upon this subject in 1824, " With so great a
tacility and celerity of communication, the pro-
vincial towns of an empire would become many
suburbs of the metropolis—or rather the effect
would be similar to that of collecting the whole
inhabitants into one city. Commodities, inven-
tions, discoveries opinions, would circulate with
a rapidity hitherto unknown, and above all, the
intercourse of man with man, province with pro-
vince, and nation with nation, would be prcdi-
giously increased."
We now look back with some pride to the
series of papers which we published in the
Scotsman on this subject four years ago, which
first developed the advantages derivable from em-
ploying locomotive carriages on railways, for
the purposes of commercial intercourse of all
kinds. There did not exist at that time a scrap
in any scientific work upon the subject, except
the old papers of Vince and Coutomb, which
merely referred to friction with very low degrees
of velocity. From very scanty data, we investi-
gated the motion of carriages or railways, and
arrived at conclusions which excited no small
surprise. Practical men, as they term their.
selves, were shocked.* We were called dreamers,
enthusiasts, and visionaries, for supposing that so
heavy a machine as the locomotive engine could
draw carriages at the rate of twenty miles an hour ;
or that men would risk their persons in vehicles
moving with such a velocity. The trial has been
made, however, and the result has confirmed and
even exceeded our most sanguine anticipations.
The engineers who were present at the experiments
now talk familiarly of thirty miles an hour as a
practicable thing—with deduction merely of the
time lost in taking in new supplies of water and
fuel ! In some theoretical points we may have
erred, for we travelled in an untrodden path ;
but when due allowance is made for the imper-
fect data we had to proceed upon, we think our
calculations in all essential points, came wonder-
fully near to the truth, as evolved by the recent
experiments.

* Mr. Nicholas Wood, one of the judges at Liverpool,
pu'di.he,l an octavo volume in 1825, containing the re-
sult of his own experiments at Killingswortb, and inserted
the following remarks in allusion to the articles in the
It is f:►r from my wish to promulgate to
the world that the ridiculous expectations, or rather pro-
fessions of the enthusiastic speculatist will be realized, and
that we shall see engines travelling at the rate of twelve,
sixteen, eighteen, or twenty miles an hour. Nothing
could do more harm towards their adoption or general
improvement than the promulgation of such nonsense !"
" Mr. Wood," as the Editor of the Mechanics' Magazine
observes, " has beep spared to see, not only what he de-
clared to be ridiculous' and nonsense,' reduced to an un-
questionable matter of fact, but of witnessing something so
much more extraordinary, that had any one hinted it to
bins in his days of incredulity, he would, we presume,
have pronounced it to be absolute m iciness."

A Char!eston Paper, advertisingfor a runaway
slave, requests that he may bedelivered at Liberty Hall! He
says, " WILL may be known by the incisions of the whip
on his back! and I suppose he has taken the road to
Coosahatchic, where he has a wife and five childen, whom
I sold last week to Mr. GICLLISPIR."

In the course of the five-and-forty years after
the first publication of LUTHER'S translation of the Bible,
it went through 101 entire editions ! One alone (CAN
snitx) disposed of 1,670,333 copies between the years
1715 and 1795.—Literary Gazette.

There is reasonable ground to believe that the
severe and often fatal operation of cutting fur the stone will
soon be completely superseded by the use of the new in-
strument, the lithotrite. Mr. KING, late house-surgeon
at the Hotel Dieu, at Paris, and present lecturer at the
Medical School in Aldersgate-street, used the instrument a
few days ago with perfect success, in the case of a man
named PLATFORD, aged 80 years, who resides at Norwich.
The stone was about three quarters of an inch in diameter.
Dr. CHARLES CLARKE and several other gentlemen were
present, and witnessed the process, which lasted 20 minutes.
Mr. KING stated the instrument as susceptible of great im-
provement.