to alarm;
and this feeling will be intensified when further proposals for
projecting carriages full of passengers in a similar method come up
for discussion. But these apprehensions will be met and answered in
the light of the fact that in the earlier part of the nineteenth
century critics of what was called "Stephenson's mad scheme" of making
trains run twenty or even thirty miles an hour were gradually induced
to calm their nerves sufficiently to try the new experience of a train
journey!

The wire-rope tramway has hitherto been used principally in connection
with mines situated in very hilly localities. Trestles are erected at
intervals upon which a strong steel rope is stretched and this carries
the buckets or trucks slung on pulley-blocks, contrived so as to pass
the supports without interference. A system of this kind can be worked
electrically, the wire-rope being employed also for the conveyance of
the current. But an inherent defect in the principle lies in the fact
that the wire-rope dips deeply when the weight passes over it, and
thus the progress from one support to another resolves itself into a
series of sharp descents, followed by equally sharp ascents up a
corresponding incline. The usual way of working the traffic is to haul
the freight by means of a rope wound round a windlass driven by a
stationary engine at the end. The constantly varying strain on the
cable proves how large is the amount of power that must be wasted in
jerking the buckets up one incline to let them jolt down another when
the point of support has been passed.

Hitherto the wire-rope tramway has been usually adopted merely as
presenting the lesser of two evils. If the nature of the hills to be
traversed be so precipitous that ruinous cuttings and bridges would be
needed for the construction of an ordinary railway or tramway line,
the idea of conveyance by wire suggests itself as being, at least, a
temporary mode of getting over the difficulty. But a great extension
of the principle of overhead haulage may be expected as soon as the
dipping of the load has been obviated, and the portion of the moving
line upon which it is situated has been made rigid. A strong but light
steel framework, placed in the line of the drawing-cable, and of
sufficient length to reach across two of the intervals between the
supports, may be drawn over enlarged pulleys and remain quite rigid
all the time.

The weight-carrying wire-rope is thus dispensed wit