that
jobbing-companies, with stupendous capital and a monopoly of
conveyance, are capable of doing as tyrannical things as any
continental autocrat!

If a section of the English public stands disgraced in the eyes of
Europe by its vicious speculation--properly speaking, gambling--in
railway finance, our country is in some degree redeemed from obloquy
by the grandeur of a social melioration which jobbing has not been
able to obstruct. The wide spread of railways over the continent, we
have said, is working a perceptible change in almost all those
arrangements which bear on the daily comforts of life. No engine of a
merely physical kind has ever wrought so powerfully to secure lasting
international peace as the steam-engine. The locomotive is every hour
breaking down barriers of separation between races of men. And as wars
in future could be conducted only by cutting short the journeys by
railway, arresting trains, and ruining great commercial undertakings,
we may expect that nations will pause before rushing into them.
Already, the French railways, which push across the frontier into the
German countries, are visibly relaxing the custom-house and passport
systems. Stopping a whole train at an imaginary boundary to examine
fifteen hundred passports, is beyond even the French capacity for
official minutiae. A hurried glance, or no glance at all--a sham
inspection at the best--is all that the gentlemen with moustaches and
cocked-hats can manage. The very attempt to look at bushels of
passports is becoming an absurdity. And what has to be done in the
twinkling of an eye, will, we have no doubt, soon not be done at all.
Thanks to railways for this vast privilege of free locomotion!

A NEW PRINCIPLE IN NATURE.

It is pretty well known that researches by Matteucci, Du Bois-Reymond,
and others, have made us acquainted with the influence of electricity
and galvanism on the muscular system of animals, and that important
physiological effects have been attributed to this influence, more
than perhaps we are warranted in assuming in the present state of our
knowledge. That an influence is exerted in some way, is clear from the
difference in our feelings in dry and wet weather: it has been
supposed, however, that the effects on the nervous system are not
produced by an accumulation of positive or of negative electricity,
but by the combination of the two producing dynamic electricity. While
these points are undergoing disc