spun in one year was nearly five
thousand millions of miles, sufficient to pass round the earth's
circumference more than two hundred thousand times--sufficient to reach
fifty-one times from the earth to the sun. It would encircle the earth's
orbit eight and a half times. The wrought fabrics of cotton exported in
one year would form a girdle for the globe passing eleven times round
the equator, more than sufficient to form a continuous sheet from the
earth to the moon. And, if this was the case thirty years ago, by what
illustrations would it be possible to depict it now (1859), when the
quantity of cotton imported by England alone is more than twelve hundred
millions of pounds?

[Sidenote: Improvements in locomotion.] But such a vast development in
that particular manufacture necessarily implied other improvements,
especially in locomotion and the transmission of intelligence. The
pedlar's pack, the pack-horse, and the cart became altogether
inadequate, and, in succession, were replaced by the canal system of the
last century, and by the steam-boats and railroads of this. [Sidenote:
Brindley's canals.] The engineering triumphs of Brindley, whose canals
were carried across valleys, over or through mountains, above rivers,
excited unbounded admiration in his own times, and yet they were only
the precursors of the railway engineering of ours. As it was, the canal
system proved to be inadequate to the want, and oaken railways, which
had long been used in quarries and coal-pits, with the locomotive
invented by Murdoch in 1784, were destined to supplant them. [Sidenote:
Stephenson's locomotives.] It does not fall within my present purpose to
relate how the locomotion of the whole civilized world was
revolutionized, not by the act of some mighty sovereign or soldier, but
by George Stephenson, once a steam-engine stoker, who, by the invention
of the tubular boiler and the ingenious device of blowing the chimney
instead of the fire, converted the locomotive of the last century,
which, at its utmost speed, could only travel seven miles an hour, into
the locomotive of this, which can accomplish seventy. [Sidenote: The
railway system.] I need not dwell on the collateral improvements, the
introduction of iron for rails, metallic bridges, tubular bridges,
viaducts, and all the prodigies of the existing system of railway
engineering.

[Sidenote: Improvement in the construction of machinery.] It is not only
on account of the giganti