3. The Champlain route;

4. The Lake route, or Welland Canal.

The first three terminate at tide-water; the last may be said to terminate in Lake Ontario, or its extension to Prescott, because the great majority of the vessels which pass the Welland Canal do not also pass the St. Lawrence. A vessel with twenty-six feet beam may proceed to sea, from any of the upper lakes, by the route of the Welland and St. Lawrence canals; but she can not enter Lake Champlain with more than twenty-three feet, or pass down the Ottawa route with more than eighteen feet beam. She may carry ten feet draft into Lake Ontario, but must lighten to nine in descending the St. Lawrence; and, if her other dimensions were reduced, she could carry five feet down the Ottawa, and six feet into Lake Champlain. From Lake Ontario, a vessel of forty-four feet beam may proceed to sea. The Chambly Canal will not admit deep vessels from the lakes, but it is more than sufficient for boats from the Ottawa, and larger than the canal which connects Lake Champlain with the Hudson. The St. Ours lock has been constructed on the scale of the St. Lawrence canals; but the enlargement of the Chambly Canal has not been undertaken,-partly be cause it has been proposed to supersede it, for western trade, by a canal from some point near Montreal to St. Johns, on the Richelieu, in order to save the detour of one hundred miles via Sorel; and partly because any enlargement would not produce its full effect until it was carried through to the Hudson, which can only be done by the state of New York. A canal which would admit the craft of the upper lakes into Champlain by the shortest and cheapest route, would place Boston (via Burlington) and New York (via Whitehall) in the same relation to the West which they now enjoy through the more distant ports of Ogdensburg and Oswego, respectively, and thus add to the St. Lawrence canals that portion of American traffic now given only to the Welland.

Whether it forced or invited a passage through to the Hudson or not, it could not fail to aid the canals above it, and is a necessary corollary to the system-unless it be determined to exclude the St. Lawrence canals from the benefit of that American transit trade which is the chief support of the Welland. So long and as often as New York and New England are better markets for western exports than other countries, these exports will go there; and, of course, by American if they can not by Canadian routes. For transatlantic trade, our canals offer a communication with the lakes, the inland portion of which is superior to that via New York; but the sea portion, inferior in rates of freight and insurance. Increased capital, by increasing trade, alone will equalize the routes. Political considerations may, however, exert an influence which can not be foreseen; but the route exists, and, if required, can be made use of to any extent by the application of that capital which now sustains its rivals.

RAILWAYS.

More than two hundred years ago, or about A.D. 1630, one Master Beaumont ruined himself in coal mining, but has been immortalized by the biographer of George Stephenson as the first man that formed a railway; for although his rails were of wood, and the wheeled vehicles were drawn by horses, yet the principle of the railway was there. These tramways were in use a century before iron was employed in them, which event is supposed to have taken place about 1738.

The birth of the Steam Engine was naturally followed by propositions to convert it into a locomotive for common roads; and between 1763 and 1800, Cugnot in France, Evans in the United States, Symington in Scotland, and Murdoch and Trevethick in England, experimented with steam carriages. The latter, in 1804, was the first to put the locomotive where it properly belongs, on the railway, but the wheels being "roughed" in order to "bite” the rail, they fairly devoured it; and though possessing some speed and a power to draw, this arrangement was almost immediately abandoned. Blenkinsop, in 1812, successfully introduced a locomotive with pinion wheels working into a racked rail, which drew thirty coal wagons at threeand a quarter miles per hour. In 1813, Blackett, a colliery owner, discovered (by simply trying the experiment) that the adhesion of a smooth wheel on the plain rail was sufficient for traction, and thus the first great step toward efficiency was gained. The locomotive, notwithstanding these strides, was still a crude and almost useless machine until George Stephenson, at this stage, applied his eminently practical mind to the subject. His first engine, however, though the most successful that had yet been constructed, showed at the end of a year's work an economy only equal to that of horsepower, and then it was, in 1815, that Stephenson applied the exhaust steam to the chimney, and by one stroke more than doubled the power of the

engine. The discovery of the steam-blast was the second and most important stride in the railway system. The waste steam instead of, as before, puffing into the air, after having done its work, was turned up the smoke-stack, immensely increasing the draught, and therefore the production of steam in proportion to the speed, so that

The faster she goes

The harder she blows

and vice versa. Persevering in his determination to overcome all obstacles, Stephenson got rid of the superfluous machinery of his predecessors, and made his engines direct acting, while he increased the adhesion by connecting the other wheels with the driving ones;-and thus, as early as 1816, constructed engines which, strange as it may appear, were "in regular and useful work, in 1858, conveying heavy coal trains at the speed of five or six miles the hour, probably as economically as any of the more perfect locomotives now in use." Notwithstanding this early demonstration of its practicability, it was not until the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, in 1830, that the success of the locomotive was admitted. So long as railways were restricted to short lines in the colliery districts, power was more important than speed; but when for the first time about to be applied on an extensive scale to general traffic, so little impression had fifteen years of constant use at the Killingworth colliery made upon the public mind, that the Directors of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway were unable to decide whether their line should be worked by fixed or locomotive power. They had indeed allowed Stephenson to place one of his engines on the line, in 1829, to assist in its construction; but though this was working under their eyes, and though more than one deputation had visited the colliery railways, on which locomotives had been successfully at work for years, it was evident that the machine of that day was more valuable for what it promised to those who could see,