Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/159

Rh something less than 1d. a mile, or $1/undefined$ part of a penny each. For, although passengers require station accommodation, they unload themselves, which coals do not.

In the autumn of 1869, the Times took up the railway problem, and, in a series of very able articles, endeavored to show the errors of the present state of things. Although advocated by so powerful a pen, the reforms still remain unaccomplished—indeed, uncommenced. It was then shown that in practice every passenger on a railway involved over 2 tons—of iron and timber—to carry him. Or, according to Mr. Haughton, no more than 30 per cent, of the load which is hauled by a goods-train represents paying weight, the remaining 70 per cent, being dead weight. This seems astonishing truly, but it is nothing to the passenger-trains, where only 5 per cent., or even less, of the load pays, the remaining 95 per cent, being made up of apparently dead and unprofitable material. It is well to keep this clearly in view. In talking about a passenger, with relation to a railway, one must not picture to one's self a respectable English country gentleman, riding perhaps some 14 stone, but some Homeric giant, magnified into prehistoric proportions, weightier than an ordinary Ceylonese elephant, and representing about 20 to 25 full sacks of coal, or $2 1/4$ tons.—Abstract from Quarterly Journal of Science.



ET us now dwell a little on two grand facts presented to us by the animated world, these two properties of living beings equally undeniable and unintelligible in their essence—habit, and hereditary tendency; and let us see how, in Darwin's theory, they will combine with intelligence. As the theory is well known, we need not state it. Cuvier believed in the unchangeableness of the animal forms placed on the globe by the Creator after each of the great convulsions through which, as he held, our planet has passed. Modern geology questions these violent commotions, and Darwin, taking up in his turn Lamarck's ideas, after fifty years of scientific progress, maintains, by almost irresistible arguments, that animal forms, instead of being unchangeable, as Cuvier supposed, are slowly modified, under the control of time, of circumstances, and of the energies with which each individual and each race "fight the battle of existence." That individual which brings into life a slight yet advantageous modification of its organs will 