The Hickman courier., 1874-03-07
Postomce Statistics.

The traveller who passes on our great
lines of thoroughfare from one city to
another has no doubt of the fact that
we live in an age of railroads and steam
boats. And yet, horses carry the mails
three miles where railroads carry them
one. Even Massachusetts, so covered
with a network of railroads that there
are few towns in the state that do not
receive daily visit from the locomotive,
has 146 stage coach routes to 81 of rail
roads. Curiously enough, the cost per
mile in the two cases is almost exactly
the same; the average1cost of the trans
portation of mails per mile in the cars
being eleven cents and six mills; by
horse, eleven cents and eight mills. OF
course, the cars carry mail many times
larger than that of the coach, so that
the cost per letter is much less.
Throughout the whole country, steam
boats carry the mails Is, 762 miles
railroacs, 63, 457 miles; and horses,
It's, 991 miles. Bat the railroad is
gradually gaining possession of all the
important routes. ln1870 the clrs car
ried the mails 43, 727 smiles; in 1873,
63, 457 lies gam Of nearly fifty per
cent. in four years. And the mails are
increasing in weight and u agnitude at
yet faster ratio. SixEy-fve years ago
the mails for the south left the New
York postoffice carried by one man,
were rowed across the. ferry, and then
placed under the boot of the waiting
stage To-day iron ten to twelve tons
of mail matter enter aud leave the New
York postoffice for tAs,s0uth: 1t is but
lsefsjgiiiYn franklin SO increasea tBe
speed of the mails that while it had
taken six weeks for letter to go from
Boston to Philadelphia and return, 1t
then took but three. To-day it takes
but one week for Letters to pass from
the shores of the Atlantic to those of
the Pacific. If the postal service con-
tinues to expand the next century as 1t
has done the last, and science shall dis
cover no more rapid means of transmits
! sion, passengers must be left out OF the
mail trains. Letters and papers will
exhaust the capacity of the steam en-
gine.
Our oceanic mails increase at yet
| faster rate. Over a thousand tons OF
letters and papers annually cross the
Atlantic; a gain of fifty per cent. with
| in the last three years.
The differences between sparse and
a thickly settled population is best
shown by the fact that, Of three nations,
each having between thirty and forty
millions of population, Germany has
! 5, 720 postoffices, Great Britain less than
| $4,000, and the United States 33, 244.
This sparseness of population, requiring
letters to travel long distances on IN
| frequent routes, makes the cost of trans
| portation far heavier here than in Eu-
rope. In England, the maximum dis
tance letter can be carried is less than
seven hundred miles in America, from
Maine to Alaska, is five thousand miles.
And this is one of the principal reasons
why Germany nets q profit from her
| postoffices of three mil ion dollars
year, England profit Of five million,
and the United States has loss OF
nearly six millions.
The Observations to be Made of Venus
in Transitu.
Dispatches relative to the sessions OF
the transit of Venus commission are
calculated to mislead the public both as
to the personnel of the commission AM
what is being done by them. The COM
mission consists of Rear-Admiral Sands,
president, and professors Henry, Pierce,
Newcomb and Hardness. The points
considered at the last meeting were
some matters of detail respecting the
photographing experiments which aIe
not yet perfected, what arrangement
..-.r, n ! be made in ord = to enable the
hare the, { the oceaI