boundless forests. I was leaving the equator, where the well-balanced forces of nature maintained a land-surface and climate that seemed to be typical of mundane order and beauty, to sail towards the North Pole, where lay my home under crepuscular skies, somewhere about 52 deg. of latitude. It was natural to feel a little dismayed at the prospect of so great a change; but now, after three years of renewed experience of England, I find how incomparably superior is civilized life, where feelings, tastes, and intellect find abundant nourishment, to the spiritual sterility of halfsavage existence, even if it were passed in the Garden of Eden. What has struck me powerfully is the immeasurably greater diversity and interest of human character and social conditions in a single civilized nation than in equatorial South America, where three distinct races of man live together. The superiority of the bleak north to tropical regions, however, is only in their social aspect; for I hold to the opinion that, although humanity can reach an advanced state of culture only by battling with the inclemencies of nature in high latitudes, it is under the equator alone that the perfect race of the future will attain to complete fruition of man's beautiful heritage, the earth.

"The following day, having no wind, we drifted out of the mouth of the Pará with the current of fresh water that is poured from the mouth of the river, and in 24 hours advanced in this way 70 miles on our road. On the 6th of June, when in 7 deg. 55 min. N. lat., and 52 deg. 30 min. W. long., and therefore about 400 miles from the mouth of

the main Amazons, we passed numerous patches of floating grass mingled with tree trunks and withered foliage. Among these masses I espied many fruits of that peculiarly Amazonian tree, the Ubussú palm; and this was the last I saw of the great river."

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THE ENGLISH ENGINEERS.*

It was, doubtless, a congenial task for Mr. Samuel Smiles to undertake the lives of our principal engineers, inasmuch as he was distinctively qualified to perform it by his literary as well as by his professional experience. It was a chapter of English history which had to be written, and which, probably, no one could have written so well. It appears that it was the late Robert Stephenson who— after the publication of his father's life had shown that this class of biography was not so unattractive to general readers as he had previously supposed-urged Mr. Smiles to trace the history of English engineering from the beginning, and to include the labours of Vermuyden, and especially of Sir Hugh Myddelton, a designer of great merit and boldness, considering the times in which he lived, and whom Stephenson considered entitled to special notice as being the first engineer of the English series.

*Lives of the Engineers, with an Account of their principal Works, comprising also a History of Inland Communication in Great Britain.' By Samuel Smiles. J. Murray. 1861.

VOL. I.

K

Mr. Smiles has obtained a mass of original materials for the still more important lives of Brindley, the elder Rennie, and Telford; while it is obvious that his publisher has spared no pains or expense to develop and illustrate the author's conceptions; so that we have a work of rare excellence for the completeness of its accessories. In short, it is not too much to say that we now have an Engineers' Pantheon, with a connected narrative of their successive reclamations from sea, bog, and fen, a history of the growth of the inland communication of Great Britain by means of its roads, bridges, canals, and railways, and a survey of the lighthouses, breakwaters, docks, and harbours constructed for the protection and accommodation of our commerce with the world.

That this history has certain curious as well as important relations to our national progress in other directions will be evident at a glance; and one of the earliest of these is the question of labour supply for engineering works, of which the designers and even the objects are now forgotten. If the race of English engineers dates from Hugh Myddelton, the race of English navvies ascends beyond the limits of authentic history, as witness their mounds of Old Sarum and Silbury-hill, and the ditches and embankments for defence, which remain so conspicuous everywhere, and which testify to the activity of their mattocks and spades. Engineering at a remote date also showed itself in embryo, when it advanced beyond the capacity to construct mounds and ditches to appliances for transporting and fixing the

blocks of Stonehenge and its sister circles, and to the construction of the Cyclopean bridges over the Teign and the Dart. The first exhibitions of engineering to any considerable purpose were, however, its embankments and drains for the reclamation of drowned lands; and how early these commenced it is impossible to say. Probably before the absorbing Romans reached our isle, the tribes from Belgium and Friesland imported some of their contrivances of this class; and it is generally supposed that to them we owe what is regarded by its own inhabitants as the fifth division of the world, when they describe the globe as consisting of Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Romney Marsh. The last named ancient and most interesting division, 14 miles long and eight broad, is to this day held from the sea by a continuous wall or bank, on the solidity of which its preservation depends, the surface of the marsh being under the level of the sea at the highest tides. It has been so held so long, that the origin of some of its old cities, now sinking into the earth, is unknown to the antiquary. Moreover, to this day "the law and custom of Romney Marsh," though at first unwritten, lies at the bottom of all English legislation on the subject of embanking and draining. Its Jurats levy a rate on the marshmen for the maintenance of the banks, and are themselves liable to inquisitions if the necessary work is scamped. The "custom of Romney Marsh" prevails all over Kent, in the Isle of Thanet and Sandwich, and along the low marsh lands in the valley of the Stour, where the