No. We cannot venture thus to change the face of creation. What we can and shall do is to make the best of it. In a hundred years' time many countries at present undeveloped will be rich and populous. Canada, for one example, has an area greater than that of the United States, with a population smaller than the population of Greater London. And Canada, endowed as it is with almost every source of wealth, will before long become perhaps the richest country in the world. By this time next century it will also be one of the most populous. Siberia, again, with many fertile and salubrious tracts, will certainly have been more intelligently utilised than by making a vast prison of it. But when all the regions available for human habitation are populated and made use of, the centres of civilisation will probably lie very much where they lie now; and here the congested populations will have found that they can no longer tolerate the waste of a neglected ocean. As we push outward from the centre of the continents, the seaboard will have to be utilised and extended. There is nothing to daunt the engineers of a hundred years hence in the project of erecting on the sea a vast floating city, fully as convenient as the present cities of terra firma, and, while vastly more healthful, quite substantial enough to resist storm and every motion of the sea, except the tides on which the city will rise and fall--tides which will no doubt furnish the motive power of many conveniences in ocean cities. There are great advantages in a city thus founded, as compared with those we at present inhabit; and we certainly shall not be able to neglect them. There will be no particular reason for economy of space or for insalubrious overcrowding (since the sea has no landlord), and breadth would make for stability as well as for convenience. Urban traffic will employ an entirely new light vehicle, the skimmer. It has been mentioned as a thing beyond doubt that the ships of a hundred years hence will no longer float in the sea, but ride on its surface, thus evading both the instability and the resistance at present so troublesome to marine engineers. As soon as the necessity arises for providing street traffic in the ocean city--when "the sea is in the broad, the narrow streets, ebbing and flowing, and the salt weed clings to the marble of her palaces"--invention will meet the demand, and light street waggons and carriages will everywhere glide about, performing the daily needs of the inhabitants. Something in the nature of break-waters will provide against wave-play and form an unequalled exterior boulevard; and by means of an invention which will long since have been called for by the requirements of other localities, the air of dwelling-houses in the ocean city will be wholesomely freed from damp.