subject; and if reform would take a useful direction it cannot be exerted in a better quarter. We can afford to blow up fortifications and establishments, and the sooner we begin the better. We have recognized the principle, or rather the Duke of Newcastle was sagacious enough to do so, that some islands which had troops and garrisons as long as they had been in our possession, and which a great number of people were found to declare could never get on without them, could bear their removal. They were withdrawn some few years ago, and the British flag is still predominant, nor have we heard in England of any extraordinary riot in consequence. Is not the time ripe or the moment propitious for going on? We might take away the general either at Barbadoes or Jamaica, and try a colonel on the staff, with a proportionate reduction in the troops as a beginning.

We might possibly even venture so far as to withdraw the regiment at Trinidad, and try how a steamer with a detachment of marines might answer for a while, before we proceeded further. Are we always to go on taking it for granted that these communities-most of them infinitely better off than we are at home-are to do nothing at any time for themselves? Shall we always go on paying them the bad. compliment of looking on the majority of them as thieves and vagabonds, against whom the better part of society can make no head or organization without the presence of a body of soldiers? If the dignity of our colonies requires a military body, it is to be hoped the same feeling will induce them to pay for it. No better test of the necessity or otherwise of keeping the troops could be made than the option of paying for them or of having them withdrawn. There is hardly a place we possess which might not have been bought over and over again for the sums we have laid out on it in military protection, but still we go on spending as if we felt that we could not maintain ourselves without an approach to bribery. There is surely a wiser and a better course in every way than this senseless one before us. As well might an army disperse itself, and fancy in that extended order that it could maintain itself against a compact enemy, as to suppose that we gain anything by acting as we do in distributing our troops all over the world. It is idle, in the face of our estimates, to accuse economy as the cause of our shortcomings. The real and only true cause is the folly and want of judgment with which we spend whatever is voted.

Our West India Islands might, if we would only give them a chance, manage to take care of themselves, assisted by such aid as we could easily contrive to give with our naval force, always paramount as it should be to any other in the same seas. At all events, since steam has changed things so much as to throw discredit on the old system, let us try, as gradually and cautiously as may be, what attempt we can make at a new one. The public interests, and the well-being of the army, which would be saved so much colonial service in one of the climates most destructive to it in every way, are both concerned in a consideration of the matter. These islands at one time had all more or less a militia force, always popular amongst them; and a reorganization of that service, if it no longer exists, would make them quite independent, in the defence of property or internal order, of the handful of troops which they seem to think so much about, but which in reality

they only care for as society, for the money they distribute, or as a part of the dignity of the place. Every reduction of any useless or worse than useless military port, either abroad or at home, is too great a gain in every respect to be neglected, and it is quite preposterous to maintain them in the abundance in which we have them. Our troops cannot boast of so much time spent at home that we can afford thus uselessly to impose work upon them. With the changes in the times we should take into consideration the whole distribution of our army, and conduct the defence of the empire on some solid principles, the efficiency of which would be evident and understood. At present we disperse our army, but why or wherefore it is sent here or there in many instances, no man with a military idea in his head can comprehend. Our military administration at this moment is so situated, that even in clearing away the rubbish much good may be done, and, as the site becomes more open, the plan of a new and a better edifice may be inspired.

We sent out a commission, at the close of the war with France, to decide on the amount of our military force in the colonies; a similar commission might sit in London at the present time to decide on the principles of the defence of those possessions as a whole. They have been united, or nearly so, by steam since they were last discussed; it is time they should receive attention again. A good garrison at Bermuda, out of the usual track of hurricanes, having a dockyard, and containing the stores and supplies for the navy, is the only position we require against America, and for the protection of all our interests in that part of the world, and sooner or later we shall find it out. At present, Bermuda is by no means as strong in its garrison as it should be, because Jamaica and Barbadoes require to be indulged in the waste between them of three regiments. We have but two companies of artillery there, but there are four dispersed between Berbice and Kingston. Oh, for something to show us the rules by which we act, or the reasons by which we are governed in our military arrangements. When we have these, the highway to improvement will be clear before us, but not sooner. The confidence of the country runs high in his Royal Highness at the head of the army, and among the subjects which are likely to be brought under his notice, the unnecessarily attenuated distribution of the army in some of the colonies will surely be one of them; nor will that of the failure of voluntary enlistment, as declared by the acts of the legislature, and our enlistment of foreigners in the late war, not as a mere stop-gap, but as a very large portion of our armed force, and at a cost in the aggregate of several millions, be, it is to be hoped, entirely neglected.

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THE PUNISHMENTS IN THE TOWER.-Very numerous desertions are now taking place in the Coldstream Guards, quartered in the Tower of London. Much of the desertion arises from the discontent engendered by the continuance of the bullring drill." The scene of the drill to which we before objected has been changed to the moat of the Tower, a locality equally exposed to public view. There is abundant space in the Tower, out of the sight of the ordinary visitors, and in adopting this the poor culprits undergoing knapsack drill might have the dreadful twelve-feet ring materially enlarged.

ENGLISHMEN, said an American orator the other day, love utility; their very toys are electricity and steam. The dull magnetic stone that steadily points to the pole is of more value in their eyes than the brightest diamond in their regalia. With the nautical instincts of the old Norsemen still clinging to them, they look upon the sea as a ring connecting England by marriage with all other nations, and either the "compass or a "sea-shell" ought to be their national emblem, as representing a power built upon the waves.

This talented American might also have added, that the steam-engine is not only one of our useful toys, but that it is one of our own making. The steam-engine is an iron Englishman, aye, every rivet, shaft and rod, crank and spindle, piston and boiler, paddle and screw. With this modern Hercules, Englishmen shake their island from end to end with the thunder of their labours. The exertions of six hundred millions of men are performed by steam, in mills alone, in England; and what is it doing upon the ocean? The shipwright* yet lives who built the first steamer that made the first sea voyage, and now, short as is that period, steam has nearly knocked the trident out of old Neptune's grasp. It was only yesterday that the passage across the Atlantic was proved by a celebrated savant to be impossible for steamers, but the impossibility of yesterday is now made possible every eight days. And contracts are out to connect Britain with her Australian colonies by a line of screw clippers; and we put faith in contracts-they are binding.

If measured by the passage of days and years the history of Britain's great toy would be brief, but the crowded succession of scientific triumphs, the struggles of genius, the growth of powerful companies, the expansion of commerce, the spread of intelligence, and the colossal development of steam-ships, which have been hatched into life by this new power, would fill volumes. Watt, Stephenson, and Pitcoal have forced Britons ahead of the rest of mankind, and turned the sweat of their brows into power and renown.

In the history of steam it is a long way from a kettle of boiling water to the stupendous engines of a line-of-battle-ship, and yet all the intermediate steps of this modern giant may be traced very clearly. The ancients were contented with a Hercules of their own, and knew nothing of the gigantic power that lay hidden from their view in the expansive force of steam. The speculations of Plato, the steam-kettle and ball of Hero, who flourished about 120 years before Christ, as well as his steam oracle, were ingenious toys, but it is difficult to discover in them the germ of the steam-engine. Indeed, after the age of Hero of Alexandria, mankind forgot all about them, for we hear nor see any more traces of steam as a power for about 1600 years.

* Wigram and Green of Blackwall.

But as every footprint of the modern giant is worthy of notice, we recognise the first step in advance in some unpublished manuscripts left by the celebrated Italian painter Leonardo da Vinci, about the year 1500. These singular documents have been preserved in the library of the Institute of France. In one of these manuscripts there is a rude sketch of what may fairly be called a steam-gun, and the figure below is a reduced copy of it. "One-third of this instrument," for so says

LEONARDO DA VINCIES STEAM' QUN

the manuscript, "consists of fire and coal, with which water can be heated, so as to produce steam so abundant and so powerful, that the effects of its force will propel a ball weighing rather more than a talent." The words "carbon," or coals, and "acq.," water, are marked upon the carriage of this instrument. We never heard that this weapon was used, or even exhibited, like our steam-gun at the Adelaide Gallery some years ago.

The seventeenth century brought forth several eminent men possessing clearer views of the nature of steam and of its utility in raising water. Of these worthies our gossipping sketch cannot do more than mention the names of Solomon de Caus, J. B. Porta, Father Kircher; and it is not until we come to the Marquis of Worcester that we are able to recognise another footprint of the giant steam in the sands of time. But even the Marquis, singular as his inventions are, did not appear to have been acquainted with the effect of condensation, although he evidently knew that steam heated in a close vessel acquired an immense degree of force. Nevertheless, to this patriotic nobleman must be ascribed the first invention and trial of a practical mode of applying steam as a prime mover. Up to this period the various machines or instruments made by Hero of Alexandria, Leonardo da Vinci, Solomon de Caus, Father Kircher, and others, were the amusing toys of ingenious minds rather than serviceable aids to man. But the Marquis of Worcester made steam a worker even in its infancy. In his 99th invention he shows "how to make one pound weight to raise an hundred;" and in his 100th invention, he so contrives a waterwork "that a child's force bringeth up an hundred foot high an incredible quantity of water, &c.; and though the engine work night and day from one end of the year to the other it will not require 40s. reparation."

Such a valuable agent as this was not likely to remain unemployed. Dr. Papin took him in hand about the year 1682, and gave him a safety-valve, by some called a "digester ;" and Captain Thomas Savery obtained a patent in 1698, for "raising water and occasioning motion to all sorts of mills by steam." Savery exhibited a working model of his U. S. MAG., No. 339, FEB., 1857.

N

machine to the Royal Society of London in the following year, and the young giant" was accordingly introduced for the first time to a respectable and learned body.

Ingenious as Savery's engine was, it could, however, only be used where the lift did not exceed a certain height, and it was found that, like most inexperienced persons, our young giant wasted his powers. A celebrated Dr. Robison attended to him at this period of his existence, and found that eleven-twelfths of the whole steam were uselessly condensed in the receiver, and not more than one-twelfth was employed for useful purposes. Many attempts were made to correct this great defect, but all to no purpose, until Thomas Newcomen, a native of Dartmouth in Devonshire, and an ironmonger by trade, taught him how to economise his strength and to use it more advantageously.

Steam now soon became a hard-working fellow. With Savery's engine water was raised by force of steam, and partly by the pressure of the atmosphere; but in Newcomen's engine water was raised entirely by the pressure of the atmosphere. The superiority of the latter principle was at that time immense, and atmosphere now became the prime mover. The form of the engine, too, assumed a new shape, and was used for other industrial purposes than raising water. The patent for Newcomen's engine was granted in 1705, but seven years elapsed before his invention was reduced to a working state. However, busy people were employed improving the condition of the engine, urged by the necessity of obtaining labour for mining purposes.

We now are arrived at a most remarkable event in the career of steam, viz., its first application to purposes of navigation. We believe but few people are aware that one Jonathan Hulls attempted to use steam-vessels for towing ships in and out harbours as far back as December, 1736, or about 120 years ago; yet, as will be seen, this remarkable man obtained a patent on the 21st December, 1736, for what to all intents and purposes was a steam-boat. An account of this vessel, illustrated by a plate, was published in a tract by Hulls, at that period, under the title of "A description and draught of a new invented machine for conveying vessels or ships out of any harbour, port, or river, against wind or tide or in a calm." This singular pamphlet bears evidence of being the work of a mechanical genius, and, together with the accompanying drawing, which is appended thereto, may be seen in the British Museum, and in Fincham's "History of Naval Architecture." One important fact is gleaned from this pamphlet, viz., it settles all doubts as to who was the first person that suggested the use of the power of steam as a means of propelling paddle-wheels, and we cannot but regret that Hulls did not meet the encouragement he merited. But he did not labour in vain, as we shall see as we proceed with our gossip.

Notwithstanding the increased utility of the engine up to this period (about 1750) steam was principally used for drawing water. The progress of refinement and art, however, soon demanded assistance from this new labourer, and a glorious reward awaited the genius who could adapt its rude strength to the more delicate operations of the arts and manufactures of this country. Such a genius appeared, and in the beginning of the year 1765, Mr. Watt made his admirable discovery of