ase in that great development of means of land transit
that has been the distinctive feature (speaking materially) of the
nineteenth century. The nineteenth century, when it takes its place with
the other centuries in the chronological charts of the future, will, if
it needs a symbol, almost inevitably have as that symbol a steam engine
running upon a railway. This period covers the first experiments, the
first great developments, and the complete elaboration of that mode of
transit, and the determination of nearly all the broad features of this
century's history may be traced directly or indirectly to that process.
And since an interesting light is thrown upon the new phases in land
locomotion that are now beginning, it will be well to begin this
forecast with a retrospect, and to revise very shortly the history of
the addition of steam travel to the resources of mankind.

A curious and profitable question arises at once. How is it that the
steam locomotive appeared at the time it did, and not earlier in the
history of the world?

Because it was not invented. But why was it not invented? Not for want
of a crowning intellect, for none of the many minds concerned in the
development strikes one--as the mind of Newton, Shakespeare, or Darwin
strikes one--as being that of an unprecedented man. It is not that the
need for the railway and steam engine had only just arisen, and--to use
one of the most egregiously wrong and misleading phrases that ever
dropped from the lips of man--the demand created the supply; it was
quite the other way about. There was really no urgent demand for such
things at the time; the current needs of the European world seem to have
been fairly well served by coach and diligence in 1800, and, on the
other hand, every administrator of intelligence in the Roman and Chinese
empires must have felt an urgent need for more rapid methods of transit
than those at his disposal. Nor was the development of the steam
locomotive the result of any sudden discovery of steam. Steam, and
something of the mechanical possibilities of steam, had been known for
two thousand years; it had been used for pumping water, opening doors,
and working toys, before the Christian era. It may be urged that this
advance was the outcome of that new and more systematic handling of
knowledge initiated by Lord Bacon and sustained by the Royal Society;
but this does not appear to have been the case, though no doubt the new
habits of mind