very useful in this connection. From a heap of tailings the miner can select a sample, by boring into it with a thin tube, inside of which revolves a shaft carrying at its end a flat steel rotary scoop. The auger, after working its way to the bottom of the heap, is raised, and, of course, it contains a fair sample of the sand at all depths from the top downwards. On a somewhat similar principle the unloading of ships laden with grain, ore, coal, and all other articles which can be handled in bulk and divided, will be carried out by machines which, by rotary action, will work their way down to the bottom of the hull and will then be elevated by powerful lifting cranes. For other classes of goods permanent packages and tramways will be provided in each ship, and trucks will be supplied at the wharf.

For coastal passages across shallow but rough water like the English Channel, the services of moving bridges will be called into requisition. One of these has been at work at St. Malo on the French coast opposite Jersey, and another was more recently constructed on the English coast near Brighton. For the longer and much more important service across the Channel submarine rails may be laid down as in the cases mentioned, but in addition it will be necessary to provide for static stability by

fixing a flounder-shaped pontoon just below the greatest depth of wave disturbance, and just sufficient in buoyancy to take the great bulk of the weight of the structure off the rails. In this way passengers may be conveyed across straits like the Channel without the discomforts of sea-sickness.

The stoking difficulties on large ocean-going steamers have become so acute that they now suggest the conclusion that, notwithstanding repeated failures, a really effective mechanical stoker will be so imperatively called for as to enforce the adoption of any reasonably good device. The heat, grime, and general misery of the stoke-hole have become so deterrent that the difficulty of securing men to undertake the work grows greater year by year, and in recruiting the ranks of the stokers resort had to be had more and more to those unfortunate men whose principal motive for labour is the insatiable desire for a drinking bout. On the occasions of several shipwrecks in the latter part of the nineteenth century disquieting revelations took place showing how savagely bitter was the feeling of the stoke-hole towards the first saloon. As soon as the mechanical fuel-shifter has been adopted, and the boilers have been properly insulated in order to prevent the overheating of the stoke-hole, the

stoker will be raised to the rank of a secondary engineer, and his work will cease to be looked upon as in any sense degrading.

On the cargo-slave steamer and sailer a similar social revolution will be brought about by the amelioration of the conditions under which the men live and work. Already some owners and masters have begun to mitigate, to a certain extent, the embargo which the choice of a seafaring life has in times past been understood to place upon married men. Positions are found for women as stewardesses and in other capacities, and it is coming to be increasingly recognised that there is a large amount of women's work to be done on board a ship.

By and by, when it is found that the best and steadiest men can be secured by making some little concessions to their desire for a settled life and their objections to the crimp and the "girl at every port," and all the other squalid accessories so generally attached in the popular mind to the seaman's career, there will be a serious effort on the part of owners to remodel the community on board of a ship on the lines of a village. There will be the 'Ship's Shop" and the "Ship's School," the "Ship's Church" and various other institutions and societies.

Thus in the twentieth century the sea will

no longer be regarded, to the same extent as in the past, as the refuge for the ne'er-do-well of the land-living populace; and this, more than perhaps anything else, will help to render travelling by the great ocean highways safe and comfortable. It is a common complaint on the part of owners that by far the larger part of maritime disasters are directly traceable to misconduct or neglect of duty on the part of masters, officers or crew; but they have the remedy in their own hands.

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CHAPTER VII.

AGRICULTURE.

MUSCULAR power still carries out all the most laborious work of the farm and of the garden -work which, of course, consists, in the main, of turning the land over and breaking up the sods. In the operations of ploughing, harrowing, rolling, and so forth, the agency almost exclusively employed is the muscular power of the horse guided by man-power; with the accompaniment of a very large and exhausting expenditure of muscular effort on the part of the farmer or farm labourer. On the fruit and vegetable garden the great preponderance of the power usefully exercised must, under existing conditions, come direct from the muscles of men. Spade and plough. represent the badges of the rural workers' servitude, and to rescue the country residents from this oldworld bondage must be one of the chief objects to which invention will in the near future apply itself.

The miner has to a very large extent escaped from the thraldom of mere brute-work, or