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.

Last, not least