Through the instrumentality of railways also, an impetus has been imparted to the inventive and constructive faculties of the human mind.  By being brought into more frequent contact with one another, individuals whose tastes and occupations are more or less similar are naturally led to form comparisons regarding the relative merits of their respective productions.  This comparison has necessarily sharpened invention, improved taste, and suggested improvement.  It is not too much to affirm, that there is not a single branch of industry now pursued within this country which has not, directly or indirectly, been benefited to an immense degree by the introduction of railways.  Having served to bring into one market far more articles of commerce than before were exposed in it, this new mode of locomotion has to a great extent increased throughout our different trades and callings that element of a generous and wholesome competition which is the most effective agent in eliciting a high degree of skill in the cultivation of an art, or the improvement of an invention.

To railways we are also indebted for a new application to practical usefulness of one of the most powerful elements in nature’s laboratory:  we refer to the employment of electricity in the transmission of thought.  Although the wondrous powers and properties of the electric telegraph were known long before the introduction of the railway system, they were not till then made to minister, as they now do, to the information of man.  By providing facilities towards laying and protecting the delicate machinery along which electricity was to perform its marvellous exploits, railways have directly contributed to apply and develop the resources of one of the most useful and wonderful of inventions, which even in its first stage of infancy has wrought a perfect revolution in the mode of transmitting intelligence; and which promises at no very distant day to play the same part among the continents and islands of the globe that it now does between the provinces of an empire.

THE LAST OF THE PALAEOLOGI.

It would be a curious historical problem to trace the families of emperors and kings, of heroes and conquerors, from the era of their decline and fall to their ultimate extinction.  Some ‘Old Mortality’ might find as congenial employment in this field of sepulchral research as did the original in clearing up the decayed and moss-grown tombs of the Covenanters.  The genealogist makes it his business rather to flatter the great by blazoning the antiquity of their pedigrees, than to teach the world a moral lesson on the instability of earthly grandeur, by chronicling their reverses.  Yet the churchyard has its heraldry, from whose records wisdom might be extracted for the benefit of the living.