and the education of the people. And without the steam-press, it would be impossible to meet the growing demands of the reading public. The American printing machines, now used in all the large newspaper establishments of Great Britain, turn off very commonly ten to fifteen thousand impressions in the hour. Every railway station in towns is a book mart, tempting the passenger to seek information or amusement. The greater development given to printing by steam power has enlarged the operation of the other collateral arts;-typecasting, bookbinding, paper-making, engraving, lithography, short-handwriting;-and given employment to authors and men of learning, thousands of whom now obtain a subsistence by writing for the press and the publishers. In 1792 the annual number of copies of British newspapers was fifteen millions. In 1810 it had already approximated one hundred millions. At the present time it prodigiously exceeds that number. In 1782 England had but seventy-nine newspapers. It has now nine hundred and forty-four; and there are twelve hundred and seventy-one in the United Kingdom. In 1720 North America had only seven. The United States a year or two ago were reported to have nearly a thousand, in English, French, Spanish, German, and other languages. A London morning paper employs directly from sixty to eighty persons. Eight or ten reporters relieve each other every hour during parliamentary debates, and twenty-four to thirty compositors set up folio by folio as 'copy,' or written matter, arrives. The newspapers are on sale often within two hours after speeches reported in them have been delivered. single copy of a large newspaper employs about 360,000 distinct pieces of metal; a quantity which would suffice to print a three-volume novel. And this quantity is for the most part written, printed, and published by each daily newspaper office six days out of every seven in our existence. And not alone through the newspaper press does steam promote reading and education. It is probable that by cheapening production, steam power now enables us to get a better library for one hundred pounds than could have been collected for one thousand at the beginning of the century. Undoubtedly the gift has been perverted to a large extent. The evils of vitiated cheap literature are not few. But the benefits far exceed the evils..

A

The literary correspondence of a nation is an important element of its social, commercial, and political status. Steam power has immensely cheapened and expedited this kind of inter-communication. The Indian mails now pass by Marseilles and Malta, and reach Bombay in about fifty days,

Vol. 8.-No. 31.

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Calcutta within sixty; whereas several months were required in former times with ships that could but sail. In England, our letters and papers are brought to us a few hours after the ink has dried, instead of being delayed day after day, as it was in the olden time. There are eleven thousand three hundred post-offices in the United Kingdom now, besides a large number of road letter boxes,-in the whole, at least ten thousand more receptacles for letters than existed prior to Sir Rowland Hill's great postal reform. In 1863, there passed through these post-offices six hundred and forty-two millions of letters. The amount of money transmitted by post-office orders in 1839 was three hundred and thirteen thousand pounds; in 1863 it was sixteen millions four hundred and ninety-four thousands. The British foreign mails have at their command a fleet of steamers such as the united navies of the world can scarcely match, thridding the coral reefs of the 'lone Antilles," skirting the western coast of South America, touching weekly at the ports of the United States, and bi-monthly traversing the Indian Ocean,-tracking, in fact, the face of the deep wherever England has great interests, or her sons have many friends. Even the vast Pacific, which a hundred years ago was rarely penetrated even by the adventurous circumnavigator, has become a highway for the passage of Her Majesty's mails; and letters pass to Australia and New Zealand, our very antipodes, as quickly as epistles of old reached the Highlands of Scotland or the western counties of Ireland. Directly or indirectly, this world-begirding correspondence is the effect of steam power.

It would be of little avail that man physical and intellectual had been thus prodigiously assisted by steam, if man moral and religious had received no furtherance. But with the growth of steam power come many moral changes. Railways, steamships, and the other developments of steam power modify the characters of men. Not only is promptness of action, not only is decision of character promoted, but, as we have pointed out, the amenities of social life are furthered, and the interest widened which human beings take in each other. 'How much,' says Dr. Lardner, 'the spread of civilisation, the diffusion of knowledge, the cultivation of taste, and the refinement of habits and manners depend upon the easy and rapid intermixture of the constituent elements of society, it is needless to point out. Whilst population exists in detached and independent masses, incapable of transfusion amongst each other, their dormant affinities are never called into action, and the most precious qualities of each are never imparted to the other. Like solids in physics, they are slow to form combinations;

but

but when the quality of fluidity has been imparted to them, when their constituent atoms are loosened by fusion, and the particles of each flow freely through and among those of the other, then the affinities are awakened, new combinations are formed, a mutual interchange of qualities takes place, and compounds of value far exceeding those of the original elements are produced. Extreme facility of intercourse is the fluidity and fusion of the social masses, whence such an activity of the affinities results, and whence such an inestimable interchange of precious qualities must follow.'* And this facility of intercourse stands in aid of every religious as well as of every moral interest. The vapour of steam cheapens the religious tract and book, and conveys these and the missionary as willingly and swiftly as it carries the bill of lading and the commercial traveller.

Whether steam shall always be thus at man's service depends upon conditions not yet fully ascertained. The coalfields, however large, must ultimately be exhausted. The conclusion of Mr. Edward Hull is that there is, in Great Britain, an available supply of coal nearly equal to eighty million millions of tons; which, divided by seventytwo millions of tons (the quantity raised in the year 1859), would last for eleven hundred years. Mr. Hull confesses, however, that as in the twenty years ending 1860 the annual consumption of coal exactly doubled itself, a calculation based on an annual seventy-two millions must be, of course, out of the question. As steam power becomes, every year, more extensively harnessed, the consumption of coal is continually increasing for its maintenance; and more coal is yearly used as manufactures flourish and population increases. It is calculated, by the way, that for every additional person born in this country, an additional ton of coal per annum is required. The exhaustion of the practicable. coalfields of Britain must come at a very much earlier date than the year A.D. 2800, unless some splendid invention should meanwhile accrue, enabling men to obtain power and heat from other sources than the black mineral. That some such boon awaits mankind in the future, we have a strong impulse to predict. God is good; and even His merely physical benefactions to the inhabitants of this planet are by no means exhausted.

The Steam-Engine.' By the Rev. D. Lardner, LL.D., F.R.S.

The Coalfields of Great Britain: their History, Structure, and Resources.' By Edward Hull, B.A. London: E. Stamford.

ART.

ART. III.-SUDDEN DANGERS; OR, ACCIDENTS AND EMERGENCIES.

First Help in Accidents. By C. H. Schaible, M.D. Hardwicke. 1864.

Art of Travel. By F. Galton, F.R.G.S. Murray.

The Railway Traveller's Handy Book. Lockwood.

TH

HERE are two sorts of that quality which is called presence of mind. There is that presence of mind that arrests a dangerous catastrophe, and there is that which promptly remedies the consequences of it. Sometimes both are found united; and people in whom they meet are always the most successful of explorers, emigrants, soldiers, and sailors; in short, in any active business or profession they must needs come to the front. Often, however, the man who is quick to foresee and bold to avert, sinks helpless and hopeless when the bolt has fallen; whilst another who loses his head with terror in the presence of a swift and impending calamity, regains his physical nerve and mental calm and coolness when the danger is over and the worst is known. To generalise too widely is often to fall into formidable error; but it may be remarked that race in this matter often asserts its tendencies, that the Celtic blood is commonly the quickest, boldest, and most rash in attacking danger, the Saxon the most helpful and least cast down in calamity, and that a mixture of the two has proved itself to be an admirable combination of daring and that quality which in stable parlance is known as bottom and staying power. It is true that no catastrophe or misfortune of whatever kind is really an accident in the sense in which that word is often used, i.e., a blind freak of chance, or a thing predestined to happen by Fate. What is called an accident is but the final link of a sequence of events, any one of which might have been altered in its direction by the exercise of a sagacity, knowledge, or strength, which sometimes does, and at other times does not, lie within man's grasp. But as we do not allow deaf, dumb, or blind men, or idiots or madmen, to wander about crowded thoroughfares, or to walk with a lighted candle in a powder store, because there would be not only a possibility but a probability of dangerous results; so when a man by intoxication reduces himself to the mental and physical degradation of an idiot and falls out of a railway carriage, or is crushed beneath the wheels of a cart, no one

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is surprised: we see plainly the causes which produce the so-called accident, and feel sure, from our limited knowledge of the laws of God, that so far from its being a strange mischance, it would be of the nature of a miracle if some evil had not ensued. Presence of mind is sometimes instinctive, and sometimes acquired, as the result of experience, or knowledge, or both. The first we cannot command, it is a great natural endowment; but the last may in a very large degree be obtained by energy and reflection, and when we consider the enormous amount of capital and property, and, what is more, of human life and human happiness which is so often lost beyond redemption, because at a given moment one person was too much flurried to prevent, and another was too ignorant and fearful to remedy, it may reasonably be urged that in the education of the young some amount of elementary knowledge should be imparted, calculated to be of service in certain contingencies, and some kind of moral training and discipline be used which should induce a habit of mind favourable to cool reflecting courage, and opposed to shameful and causeless panic. Some accidents involve only one life, others are great and spread widely and threaten numbers, and almost all are such as must in the nature of things lead on to more. A woman whose dress is in flames, for instance, will often set fire to those who endeavour to assist her, or to the furniture of the room, and so cause a great conflagration; and when a building is on fire in any populous place, there arises danger from many sources, danger of suffocation by smoke, of being crushed by falling walls, roofs, or fragments, and of being trampled to death in the crowd, a fate which has befallen many a luckless woman who, quite unable to help, is yet irresistibly attracted by the cry of Fire.' The burning of the Surrey Theatre afforded a rare and exceedingly satisfactory illustration of the good effects of preserving order and tranquillity on such occasions; the theatre was emptied with comparative rapidity and ease, simply because people refrained from choking up the only modes of egress, and from fighting among themselves as to who should go out first. Had the audience acted as audiences usually do act, a terrible scene must have ensued, and the usual per centage would certainly have been maimed, mutilated, and smothered. There is perhaps no juncture in which presence of mind is so imperatively called for, and so invariably lost, as in calamities by fire. Most women know, at least in theory, that they ought under such circumstances not to run out of the room, and up and down the stairs, but should lie down instantly, and try to roll a rug or some incombustible material around

them;