work to do in an uncounted number of new fields, has called in the inventor once more to adapt steam to its new work.  The “high-speed engine” is the latest form of the universal helper.  And such has been the readiness and the intelligence of the contemporary inventor that we now have engines capable of turning their shafts three hundred rotations a minute and without a perceptible variation of velocity, whatever the change of load or the suddenness with which it is varied.  In the days of Watt a fluctuation of five per cent. in speed was thought wonderfully small; in those of Corliss, the variation was restricted to two per cent. and we wondered at this unanticipated success.  To-day, thanks to Porter and Allen, to Hartnell, to Hoadley, to Sims, to Thomson, to Sweet, to Ide, and to Ball, we have seen the speed fluctuation restricted to even less than one per cent. of its normal average.

The inventors of the steam engine are, through their representatives of to-day, according to the statisticians, doing the equivalent of twelve times the work of a horse, for every man, woman and child on the globe.  We have not less, probably, than a half million of miles of railway, transporting something over 150,000,000,000 of tons a mile a year.  A horse is reckoned to haul a ton weight about six and a half miles, day by day, by the year together.  In the United States, it is reckoned that the steam engine, on the railways alone, hauls a thousand tons one mile, for every inhabitant of the country, every year, or, if it is preferred to so state it, a ton a thousand miles.  This is the way in which the East and the West are, by the inventors of the steam engine, enabled to help each other.  This costs about $10 each individual; it would require some 25 millions of horses to do the work, and would cost about $1,000 a family, which is more than twice the average family earnings.

Dr. Strong, in that remarkable book, “Our Country,” says:  “One man, by the aid of steam, is able to do the work which required two hundred and fifty men at the beginning of the century.  The machinery of Massachusetts alone represents the labor of more than 100,000,000 men, as if one-half of all the workmen of the globe had engaged in her service.”  And again:  “Some thirty years ago, the power of machinery in the mills of Great Britain was estimated to be equal to 600,000,000 men, or more than all the adults, male and female, of all mankind.”  Mr. Gladstone estimated that the aggregation of wealth on the globe during the whole period from the birth of Christ to that of Watt was equaled by the production in twenty years, at the middle of this century, with the aid of machinery driven by the fruit of the brain of the inventors of the steam engine.  We may probably now safely estimate the former quantity as rivaled in less than five years, while, since the birth of Watt and his engine, and the production of the spinning mule, the power loom, the cotton gin and our own patent system and its marvelous mechanism,