objects the promotion of the growth and increasing the usefulness of the
applied sciences.

We have now one of the greatest triumphs of engineering art in the Mont
Cenis Railway, and this, though worked out under great difficulties, has
proved a perfect success. Still more recently we have had brought under
our notice the bold scheme of connecting Britain and France by a tunnel
under the English Channel--a project which, but a few years ago, any one
would have been thought mad to propose; but science has proved that it
can be carried out; and it is only a few days since a large meeting was
held in Liverpool with a view of tunnelling under the Mersey, and thus
connecting Liverpool and Birkenhead. Nor do these schemes seem at all
visionary when we learn that our go-ahead Transatlantic cousins have a
project before the Legislature of New Jersey for laying wooden tubes
underground, through which the mails and small parcels will be forwarded
at the rate of 150 miles an hour! Through a similar tube, 6 feet in
diameter, laid under the East and Hudson Rivers, passengers are to be
transported from Brooklyn to Jersey city. A like scheme is in course of
construction under the Thames.[A] Another American engineering triumph
will be the railway suspension bridge proposed to be built across the
Hudson River at Peekskill, in the hilly district known to New Yorkers as
the Highlands, which is to have a clear span of 1600 feet at a height of
155 feet above high water.

Another grand and comparatively recent application of steam is in its
adaptation to agriculture. Fields are now turned up by the
steam-plough--an invention as yet in its infancy--in a manner that could
never be done by mere hand-labour. Steam-culture has already penetrated
as far north as John-o'-Groats, where I have one of the ploughs of Mr.
Howard of Bedford, and but for its assistance I could not have taken in