Leaving altogether the countries of Europe, and crossing the Mediterranean, we find that even Africa is becoming a member of the great railway system. After a world of trouble, financial and diplomatic, the present ruler of Egypt has succeeded in giving reality to a scheme for a railway from Alexandria to the Nile. A glance at a map of Egypt will shew us that a canal extends from Alexandria to the Nile, to escape the sanded-up mouths of that famous river. It is mainly to expedite the overland route, so far as concerns the transit along this canal, that the railway now in process of construction has been planned; anything beyond this, it will be for future ages to develop. The subject of the Isthmus of Suez and its transit has been frequently treated in this Journal , and we will therefore say nothing more here, than that our friend Bradshaw will, in all probability, have something to tell us concerning the land of Egypt before any long time has elapsed.
Asia will have a spider-line of railway by and by, when the slow-coach proceedings of the East India Company have given something like form to the Bombay and Bengal projects; but at present the progress is miserably slow; and Bradshaw need not lay aside a page for the rich Orient for many years to come.
There are a few general considerations respecting the present aspect of the railway system, interesting not only in themselves, but as giving a foretaste of what is to come. In the autumn of last year, a careful statistician calculated that the railways of Europe and America, as then in operation, extended in the aggregate to 25,350 miles, the total cost of which was four hundred and fifty millions of pounds. Of this, the United Kingdom had 7000 miles, costing L.250,000,000. According to the view here given, the 7000 miles of our own railways have been constructed at an expense prodigiously greater than the remaining 18,350 miles in other parts of the world. It needs no figures to prove that this is the fact. Many of the continental and American railways are single lines, and so far they have been got up at a comparatively small cost. But the substantial difference of expense lies in our plan of leaving railway undertakings to private parties—rival speculators and jobbers, whose aim has too frequently been plunder. And how enormous has been that plunder let enriched engineers and lawyers—let impoverished victims—declare. Shame on the British legislature, to have tolerated and legalised the railway villainies of the last ten years; in comparison with which the enforcements of continental despotisms are angelic innocence!
Besides being got up in a simple and satisfactory manner, under government decrees and state responsibility, the continental railways are evidently more under control than those of the United Kingdom. The speed of trains is regulated to a moderate and safe degree; on all hands there seems to be a superior class of officials in charge; and as the lines have been made at a small cost, the fares paid by travellers are for the most part very much lower than in this country. Government interference abroad is, therefore, not altogether a wrong. Annoying as it may sometimes be, and bad as it avowedly is in principle, there is in it the spirit of protection against private oppression. And perhaps the English may by and by discover that jobbing-companies, with stupendous capital and a monopoly of conveyance, are capable of doing as tyrannical things as any continental autocrat!
If a section of the English public stands disgraced in the eyes of Europe by its vicious speculation—properly speaking, gambling—in railway finance, our country is in some degree redeemed from obloquy by the grandeur of a social melioration which jobbing has not been able to obstruct. The wide spread of railways over the continent, we have said, is working a perceptible change in almost all those arrangements which bear on the daily comforts of life. No engine of a merely physical kind has ever wrought so powerfully to secure lasting international peace as the steam-engine. The locomotive is every hour breaking down barriers of separation between races of men. And as wars in future could be conducted only by cutting short the journeys by railway, arresting trains, and ruining great commercial undertakings, we may expect that nations will pause before rushing into them. Already, the French railways, which push across the frontier into the German countries, are visibly relaxing the custom-house and passport systems. Stopping a whole train at an imaginary boundary to examine fifteen hundred passports, is beyond even the French capacity for official minutiæ. A hurried glance, or no glance at all—a sham inspection at the best—is all that the gentlemen with moustaches and cocked-hats can manage. The very attempt to look at bushels of passports is becoming an absurdity. And what has to be done in the twinkling of an eye, will, we have no doubt, soon not be done at all. Thanks to railways for this vast privilege of free locomotion!
A NEW PRINCIPLE IN NATURE
It is pretty well known that researches by Matteucci, Du Bois-Reymond, and others, have made us acquainted with the influence of electricity and galvanism on the muscular system of animals, and that important physiological effects have been attributed to this influence, more than perhaps we are warranted in assuming in the present state of our knowledge. That an influence is exerted in some way, is clear from the difference in our feelings in dry and wet weather: it has been supposed, however, that the effects on the nervous system are not produced by an accumulation of positive or of negative electricity, but by the combination of the two producing dynamic electricity. While these points are undergoing discussion, we have an opportunity of bringing before our readers the results of investigations bearing on the general question.
Most persons are aware of the fact, that a peculiar taste follows the application of two different metals to the tongue in a popular galvanic experiment. This taste is caused by the azotic acid formed from the oxygen and azote of the atmosphere. An electric discharge, too, is accompanied by a smell, which smell is due to the presence of what is called ozone; and not long ago M. Schoenbein, of Basel, the inventor of guncotton, discovered ozone as a principle in the oxygen of the atmosphere; and it is considered to be the active principle of that universal constituent. Later researches have brought out a striking analogy between the properties of ozone and chlorine, and have led to conclusions as to the dangerous effect which the former may produce, in certain cases, on the organs of respiration. Some idea of its energy may be formed from the fact, that mice perish speedily in air which contains one six-thousandth of ozone. It is always present in the atmosphere in a greater or lesser degree, in direct relation with the amount of atmospheric electricity, and appears to obey the same laws in its variations, finding its maximum in winter and its minimum in summer.
Ozone, in scientific language, is described as 'a compound of oxygen analogous to the peroxide of hydrogen, or, that it is oxygen in an allotropic state—that is, with the capability of immediate and ready action impressed upon it.' Besides being produced by electrical discharges in the atmosphere, it can be obtained artificially by the passing of what is called the electrical brush into the air from a moist wooden point, or by electrolyzed water or phosphorus. The process, when the latter substance is employed, is to put a small piece, clean scraped, about half an inch long, into a large bottle which contains just so much of water as to half cover the phosphorus, and then closing the mouth slightly, to guard against combustion, to leave it standing for a time in a temperature of about 60 degrees. Ozone soon begins to be formed, as shewn by the rising of a light column of smoke from the phosphorus, which, at the same time, becomes luminous. In five or six hours, the quantity will be abundant, when the bottle is to be emptied of its contents, washed out, and closed for use and experiment.
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