land. It would scarcely do for them to be brief in
their discussions, and above all other things, spice and piquancy
must always be excluded. _Engineering_ evidently labors under the
conviction that the heavier it can make its discussions, the more
profoundly will it be able to impress its readers. Hence, we are
equally astonished and gratified to find a gleam of humor flashing out
from the ordinary sober-sided composition of our learned contemporary.
The article came to us just as we were laboring under an attack of
dyspepsia, and its reading fairly shook our atrabilious _corpus_. We
said to ourselves, "can it be possible that _Engineering_ is about to
experience the new birth, to undergo regeneration, and a baptism of
fire?" The article is really worth reading, and we begin to indulge
the hope that at least one English technical is going to try to make
itself not only useful, but readable and interesting. And what is
most perplexingly novel in this new manifestation, is the display of
a considerable amount of egotism, which we had always supposed to be
a sinful and naughty thing in technical journalism. And, as if to
magnify this self-complaisance, it actually alludes to its "_own
extensive and ever-increasing circulation in America_." Now to show
how small a thing can impart comfort to the soul of our cotemporary,
we venture to say that the circulation of _Engineering_ in this
country cannot much exceed three hundred copies per week.

It evidently amazes our English cotemporary that a journal like the
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, which, according to its own notions, is chiefly
the work of "scissors and paste," should circulate so widely; and it
even belittles our weekly circulation by several thousand copies,
in order to give point to its very amusing, and, we will also add,
generally just criticism.

The writer in _Engineering_, whoever he may be, appears to be a sort
of literary Rip Van Winkle, just waking out of a long sleep; and
he cannot get the idea through his head that it is possible that a
technical journal can become a vehicle of popular information to
the mass of mankind, instead of being the organ of a small clique of
professional engineers or wealthy manufacturers, such as seems to
hold control of the columns of _Engineering_, and who use it either
to ventilate their own pet schemes and theories, or to advertise, by
illustration and otherwise, in the reading columns, a repetition of
lathes, axle-boxes brakes,