Many old-fashioned people who read of the massacres caused by steamboat collisions, think regretfully of the time when eight hundred sail of ships would make the trip between Tyne and Thames without so much as the loss of a bowsprit from one of the fleet.  It was slow work, perhaps, and it might be a tedious sight (say those who praise past times), to see a ship being hauled up the river foot by foot with a warp and a kedge; yet we do not get cheap coals now, for all our science, and we have lost our seamen.  The old inhabitants of the eastern seaports never cease to lament the progress of steam.  They point out that all the money made in the brig colliers goes into few hands, and is carried away to be spent in London and Torquay, and Cannes, and Paris, by the great coalowners.  They say, too, that the new race of seamen are unsocial beings who do no good to any town that the steamers run from.  The modern “hand” comes into the river, say, at dusk; sees his vessel put under the coal spout, jumps ashore to buy a loaf and a few herrings, and then goes off to sea by three in the morning.  This goes on all the year round, and if the sailor gets four-and-twenty hours to spend at home, he thinks himself wonderfully lucky.  The sailor-men of old times seldom worked in the winter.  All the colliers were laid up in the river, and the men lived on their summer earnings, so that multitudes of small tradesmen, who are now unable to live, fared very comfortably then.

These complaints may not be very logical or well founded, but the people who make them speak with perfect belief.  Whatever may be thought of the social aspect of the question, the nautical aspect is not to be mistaken; for our school of seamen is undoubtedly departed.

The old collier sailor was a man of one faculty:  he could handle a ship to perfection, but he could do nothing else, and he knew nothing else.  On shore he was a child of the most innocent description, and the world that lay outside the regular line traversed by his old black tub, was a place beyond his conception.  It is true that he sometimes went to such far-off regions as the Baltic, but even that extent of travel failed to open his mind.  The worthy man who said that the four quarters of the globe were “Russia, Prussia, Memel, and Shields,” was the type of the travelled collier captain.  It is hardly possible to understand the complete ignorance of some of those fine sailors, or to conceive the methods on which they worked their ships.  A man who could neither read nor write would take his vessel without a mistake from port to port.  The lights on the coast were his only books, and his one intellectual exercise consisted in calculating the set of the ebb and the flood.  With all the phenomena that he was used to observe in his ordinary life, he could deal promptly and sagaciously, but anything new tended to disarrange his mind.  When steamers were first ordered to carry red and green side-lights with a high white