ng. Still, as he is the only man who is ever alleged to have
covered so great a distance as six thousand feet in an obstructed fall,
the matter is not without interest; for, according to the accepted rule
for finding the velocity of a body falling freely from rest, he must
have been going at the rate of seven miles a second when he reached the
bottom.

About Burman's record there can be no doubt, for it was made in the
presence of many witnesses, and it was duly timed with stop-watches by
men skilled in the art. The straightaway mile over the smooth, hard
beach was covered from a running start in the almost incredibly short
time of 25.40 seconds.

The next fastest mile ever traveled by human beings who lived to tell
about it was made in an electric-car on the experimental track between
Berlin and Zossen, in 1902. As the engineers who achieved this record
for the advancement of scientific knowledge of the railroad considered
such speed dangerous, it is not at all likely to become standard
practise. The fastest time ever made by a steam locomotive of which
there is any record, was the run of five miles from Fleming to
Jacksonville, Florida, in two and a half minutes by a Plant system
locomotive in March, 1901. This was at the rate of 120 miles an hour.
As for steamships, the record of 30.53 miles per hour is held by the
_Mauretania_.

These things, if borne in mind, will serve to throw into stronger
relief the things that an automobile can do, and to supply a
substantial basis for the premise that, at least in some respects, the
automobile is the most marvelous machine the world has yet seen. It can
go anywhere at any time, floundering through two feet of snow, ford any
stream that isn't deep enough to drown out the magneto, triumph over
mud axle deep, jump fences, and cavort over plowed ground at fifteen
miles an hour. It has been used with brilliant success in various kinds
of hunting, including coyote coursing on the prairies of Colorado,
where it can run all around the bronco, formerly in favor, since it
never runs any risk of breaking a leg in a prairie-dog hole. Educated
automobiles have been trained to shell corn, saw wood, pump water,
churn, plow, and, in short, do anything required of them except figure
out where the consumer gets off under the new tariff law.

But to get back to the subject of speed, as automobile talk always
does, the supremacy of the motor-car has been established by so many
official reco