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 the land I have now worked up.  So great is the demand for steam-cultivating apparatus, not only in Britain, but throughout the German plains and the flat alluvial soils of Egypt, that the makers have now more orders than they can readily supply.

In all our manufactories steam proves itself the motive power, and there is hardly a large work without it.  This city can show its weaving, spinning, bleaching, and dyeing works—­all which have tended to raise Glasgow from the small town of Watt’s time to the proud position it now holds of being the first commercial city of Scotland.  In this city, second only to Manchester in the production of cotton goods, it cannot fail to be interesting to state, that in the first nine months of the present year there has been exported 2,188,591,288 yards of cotton piece-goods manufactured in this country—­a larger quantity by nearly 150,000,000 yards than the corresponding period of 1867, the year of the largest export of cotton manufactures ever known until then.  Of course Glasgow has had its share in this great branch of export trade, rendering it large, wealthy, and populous—­results which have mainly followed from the application of science to art.