nus
mirabilis_ in the industrial history of mankind. It was in that year
that the railway locomotive was invented by Richard Trevithick, who
had studied the steam engine under a friend and assistant of James
Watt. His patent, which was secured during the ensuing year, makes
distinct mention of the use of his locomotive driven by steam upon
tramways; and in 1803 he actually had an engine running on the
Pen-y-Darran mining tramway in Cornwall. From that small beginning has
grown a system of railway communication which has brought the farthest
inland regions of mighty continents within easy reach of the seaboard
and of the world's great markets; which has made social and friendly
intercourse possible in millions of homes which otherwise would have
been almost destitute of it; which has been the means of spreading a
knowledge of literature, science and religion over the face of the
civilised world; and which, at the present moment, constitutes the
outward and visible sign of the difference between Western
civilisation and that of the Asiatic, as seen in China.

In another corner of the globe, during the year 1801, Volta was
constructing his first apparatus demonstrating the material and
physical nature of those mysterious electric currents which his friend
Professor Galvani of Bologna, who died just two years earlier, had at
first ascribed to a physiological source. The researches of the
latter, it will be remembered, were begun in an observation of the way
in which the legs of a dead frog twitched under certain conditions.
The voltaic pile was the first electric battery, and, therefore, the
parent of the existing marvellous telegraphic and telephonic systems,
while less immediately it led to the development of the dynamo and its
work in electric lighting and traction. It brought into harmony much
fragmentary knowledge which had lain disjointed in the armoury of the
physicist since Dufay in France and Franklin in America had
investigated their theories of positive and negative frictional
electricities, and had connected them with the flash of lightning as
seen in Nature. Thus it became a fresh starting point both for
industry and for science.

At the Exposition of National Industry, held in Paris during the year
1801, a working model of the Jacquard loom was exhibited--the
prototype of those remarkable pieces of mechanism by which the most
elaborately figured designs are worked upon fabrics during the process
of weaving