the discovery of new processes to improve or to facilitate the fabric of almost every a:ticle that is bought and sold in trade. What brilliant discoveries have been made in the progress of experiments to perfect the single art of dying cotton and wool; or that of working metals ; or that of making glass and china ware.

What new properties have been detected in minerals, and their combinations with various gases and acids. What results have been obtained by the efforts of the French chemists to expedite and thereby increase the profits of the manufacture of sugar from beet-roots. What patient and laborious investigations have been made in England, to find out a method of preventing the dry rot in timber for shipping. But it is needless to particularize. In a thousand different modes have the interests of commerce been brought to bear upon the prosecution of chemical discovery, supplying and sustaining the impulse that insures the extension of the science.

In agriculture, it is the same. To meet the demands of commerce, both chemical and mechanical science have been applied with unwearied industry, and the most gratifying success, to the improvement of soils, and the invention or perfection of agricultural implements. The properties of earths and alkalies have been sought out by the one; machines for ploughing, reaping, winnowing, and grinding, have been invented by the other; and all to make the acre that produced fifty bushels, produce a hundred; the labor that was adequate to the cultivation of ten acres, sufficient for the cultivation of ten times the number. And why? In order that the product might be more than sufficient for the subsistence of the producing population, and leave a surplus to be employed in commerce.

So too with geology, astronomy, physics, the exact sciences, even the fine arts themselves; for the manufacture of pictures and statues has become a branch, and by no means an unimportant one, of commercial business; and musicians and dancers, as well as musical instruments and music, are shipped from one country to another, on speculation, like bales of cotton; as witness the late importation of a troop of Bayaderes, or Indian dancing girls, into France, by an enterprising subject of Louis Philippe, who was lucky enough to make a transfer of his oriental prodigies to an English inanager, at a very large advance upon his own outlay of capital in the adventure. And this reminds us, too, that the study of natural history itself is brought within the universal influence of commercial speculation. We have companies formed, and incorporated, for the capture of giraffes, and other animal wonders, and it is not long since one of our packet ships carried out to England a miscellaneous cargo of lions, tigers, leopards, and the like, with a human companiin, who amuses himself and the public, by shutting himself up in the same cage with half a dozen of these formidable play-fellows.

But without carrying our inquiries farther into the circle of the sciences, which neither time nor space permit us fully to explore, let us pass to that department of human ingenuity, in which effort has been crowned with the most varied and wonderful success, and in which the achievements of skill are most directly traceable to the stimulating influence of commercial enterprise ; I mean the science of mechanics. Here we find, that almost every great discovery or improvement has been effected under the immediate impulse of that great agency which we have found to be so actively present in all enlargements of knowledge and power; almost every one has been sought for and produced, either as a means of increasing the surplus products of industry, or to facilitate the conveyance of these products from the place where they are not needed for consumption, to some other place, where there is a deficiency of these, with an excess of something that can be given in exchange for them.

The object of machinery is either to save labor, that is, to enable a certain number of men to perform a greater quantity of labor than they could perform without it, or to do the work required with greater perfection than can be attained by man's hands alone. In either case, the inducement to invent such machinery arises from the wants of others than the inventor, and their willingness to reward him for supplying those wants. The actual personal necessities of mankind, in a state of nature, are few, and easily supplied. It is not until he undertakes to supply the wants of others, that the individual finds a use for inventions that enable his one pair of hands to do the work of ten or twenty pairs, in producing food, or clothing, or any other article of necessity or enjoyment. And so of the mechanical contrivances that accomplish what labor alone cannot perform ; the mere want or inclination of an individual would never prompt him to invent them for himself alone, because his single use or enjoyment of the thing produced, would be no compensation for the trouble. For instance, the apparatus for polishing diamonds. It is scarcely to be believed, that if there were no such thing as commerce in precious stones ; if the man that had one, could do nothing with it but wear it on his finger, and please his own eyes with its restless brilliancy; that he would take the pains to contrive a machine for giving it that form by which its lustre is displayed to most advantage. Indeed, we may be tolerably sure, that if it were not admired and coveted by others, and if he did not know or believe that he could get in exchange for it something more useful or pleasant to himself, not only would he take no thought of increasing its beauty by his labor or his skill, but would even feel no inducement to have it in his possession. Instead of inventing a wheel, on which to polish it, he would throw it away as a worthless pebble, which could neither add warmth to his limbs, nor satisfy his hunger.

But to return from this digression. The most frequent object of machinery is to save lahor, or, as we have said, to enable a certain number of men to perform a greater amount of work, that is, of production, than they could without it. And, as we have seen, the advantage of this labor-saving is, that it increases the surplus beyond present demand, which is needed to supply the demand elsewhere; or, in other words, to be employed in commerce. It is to the temptation thus held out, then, or to the other temptation beld out by the advantage of conveying the surplus with greater speed and at less expense to the place where it is needed, that we owe all the wonderful creations of mechanical ingenuity. One of these stimulated Watt to the invention by which the mighty power of steam is employed in spinning cotton; the other acted upon Fulton, when he tasked his invensive brain for a means of using the same power in navigation. The

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most extensive, and ingenious, and perfect piece of machinery, probably, in the world, is that for making tackle-blocks for ships, invented by Mr. Brunel, and existing at Portsmouth in England; the most wealth-producing, we believe, is Whitney's cotton gin ; and would either of these have been discovered, but for the inducement supplied by commerce? What led to the making of the chronometer; of those marvellously accurate time-pieces, on which the government of Great Britain has lavished thousands and thousands in rewards to the perserering inventors? What but the necessity of a perfect time-piece for ascertaining the longitude of a ship at sea ? If there were no commerce between nations, there would be no ships, and the discovery of the longitude would be no desideratum. We might go on and enumerate scores of ingenious and highly useful inventions, all brought to light by the necessities of commerce; such as the curious stocking-frame, the carding-machine, the power-loom, the machines for making shingles, staves, pins, and almost every imaginable article of necessity or luxury; the ponderous trip-hammer for forging anchors; the admirable contrivances for making ropes and cordage; the flour-mill, the steam saw-mill, the ship itself, that wonderful achievement of human skill; and a hundred others, all invented and brought into operation to enlarge the prosecution, and increase the gains, of commerce. The enumeration, however, is unnecessary. Yet we must beg the reader's indulgence, for a brief space, while direct his attention to the most stupendous forms in which the art of man has bronght into subjection and employment the resistless force of steam. We mean the rail-road and the steam-ship.

It would be superfluous to enlarge upon the immense importance of these great instruments; these marvellous achievements and monuments of human skill, and successful daring. The results of their addition to the empire of the intellect are before us and around us ; and their introduction is so recent, that we have not yet had time to lose the consciousness of their magnitude, in the familiarity of habit. A year has scarcely passed away, since the arrival of the first steamship was the one engrossing theme of wondering delight among the thousands and ten thousands of our citizens; the echoes of our exultation are yet pealing back upon us from the extremest regions of the globe which we inhabit. To use the bold expression of a speaker among the crowd that filled the splendid cabin of the Great Western, a few days after her first arrival, the old and the new world had shaken hands across the waters. The uncertainties and the delays of ocean navigation were subdued; the passage from continent to continent had become a subject of calculation, not by weeks and days, but by days and hours. In the great and vastly important intercourse between Europe and America, a gain of time to the extent of nearly one half has been effected; equivalent, almost, to a doubling of that intercourse and of its advantages. It is as if the hemispheres had made a gigantic step forward into the wastes of ocean, to exchange pledges of their amity.

Yet the steam-ship, after all, is but a feeble instrument, in comparison with the rail-road. Its energies are indeed great, but they are limited. In capacity and in speed, there is a point beyond which it cannot go; but to rail-road conveyance there seems almost no

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limit. Rivers or mountains oppose no insurmountable obstacle to the long extension of the track; and the track once laid, there is no aggregation of weight or bulk, which power cannot be found to drive upon it, with a velocity that seems to outstrip the wind. The whole cargo of a ship might be transported from the Atlantic to the lakes in twenty-four hours; an army, with all its cannon and munitions, might be conveyed a thousand miles, as rapidly as the very despatch that summoned it to the point of danger.

Already we see our country interlined, as it were, with these iron high-ways, these gigantic connecting-rods of the great machine. Along the Atlantic border, they stretch almost continuously from Massachusetts to South Carolina ; and in almost every state, there is an off-shoot, if we may so call it, bearing away at right angles toward the rich plains and valleys of the west, giving assurance of an unlimited increase to the mutually advantageous intercourse between regions which nature has made distant, but which the art and enterprise of man have placed side by side ; and thus enabling us to seize at once the benefits of ample space and of close proximity. For the purposes of production, we have an extent of territory abundant for the subsistence of fifty times our number; while for the purposes of enjoyment and of use, we have, thanks to the rail-road, the facilities of a compact and thickly-peopled country. The steam-ship has taken a thousand miles from the breadth of the Atlantic; the rail-road, for every purpose which makes proximity desirable, is converting into one great city the mighty space that lies between the Atlantic and the Mississippi. And let us not forget, that both the steam-ship and the rail-road are creations of commercial necessity, and commercial enterprise. Like all other mechanical inventions, but even more directly than most others, they have sprung from the natural and irresistible impulse to which we have traced all commercial intercourse ; the impulse that prompts the inhabitants of one region to possess and enjoy the peculiar productions of every other; and we would again urge upon the reader's consideration the unquestionable truth, that whatever may be the immediate instruments, this impulse, this commercial spirit, is one of the most active and powerful agents in producing all the meliorations of society, and all our advances in knowledge. The extent and activity of its operation may be partially realized, by imagining, or endeavoring to imagine, the consequences that would follow the sudden annihilation of all the instruments which it has called into employment. "Earth has never yet seen the siege of a city, however protracted — no war, however bloody and , desolating - no revolution, however wild and ferocious — has ever shown, a parallel for the misery that would instantly descend upon the heads of millions, could such an idea be realized. The means, not only of clothing, but of food and of migration, would fail us in a moment; we should be shut out from the rest of the world; we should be reduced to a condition in which it would not be strange if even cannibalism should ensue. In a word, throughout the whole compass of society, we should be thrown back into a state of privation, helplessness, and barbarism.' From such a state we have been lifted by the strong arm of machinery, guided by intelligence, and propelled by mutual interest; and to such a state we should undoubtedly

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return, were that intelligence no longer stimulated by that interest, and the energies of our nature deprived of the inducements and the instruments by which and with which they are kept in full activity, producing and distributing, or in other words, fulfilling the ends of

commerce.

Having considered the influence of commerce upon the entire human race, we shall proceed, in another and concluding number, to trace its bearing upon mankind, as divided into nations, or separate communities.

The creeping breeze, that floats in waves,
Far o'er the flowering rye;

And purple hills, with clover buds,
Reposing blushingly;

Rich are the fields with bearded grain,
Where the broad valleys run,

To meet the mountain ramparts blue,
Gilt by the cheerful sun.

Oft shadowed into darker spots,
Beneath the floating cloud;
Oft gleaming with a rosy tinge,
Where mantling forests crowd;
All o'er the waving, g aceful line,
As forth it sweeps along,
Sweet, varied into lofty peaks,

And deep dells, filled with song.

Down midst the slopes, the village spires,
Are rising among bowers,

And o'er each dwelling's garden wall,
Break forth the truant flowers.

And here are all the yeomanry

That grace our happy soil;

Who bid it smile thus beautiful,
Beneath their cheerful toil.

The plough, and scythe, and harrow come,
And cradle, in their time,

And spread the boon of plenty round,

Within our changeful clime:

"Tis GOD that gives the sun, and shower,

The soil, and forest shade;

And husbandmen make joyful here,
The lovely world He made!

PEABODY.