{475}water was greatly facilitated by the utilization of steam; and voyages across the Atlantic, which had hitherto taken months, now began to be accomplished in a fortnight, and have since been reduced to ten days or a week. Great railroads have been built, embracing thousands and thousands of miles, and intersecting every acre of the civilized world. Telegraph wires have been stretched from end to end of the earth, and even beneath the ocean, facilitating the interchange of messages, and many minor improvements akin to these have been made. The nineteenth century is remarkable for other inventions besides, of which we daily feel the benefit. Of the rapid strides that science has made, we cannot be more entirely conscious than by contemplating the labors of such men as Faraday, Sir Charles Lyell, Sir John Herschel, Richard Owen, Hugh Miller, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and others. To this list the name of Mary Somerville must be added, for she is the one woman who takes her place in the foremost rank of scientific scholars. This is an age of great reforms, too. In Queen Victoria's reign constitutional and parliamentary government has been firmly established, and the system of social science inaugurated, and the penal laws have been modified in England. In literature, a bright galaxy of names comes to our mind. Among the philosophers are John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, George Henry Lewis, Buckle, and Lecky; while Carlyle, Macaulay, Grote, Froude, Ruskin, and Miss Martineau represent some of the historians and essayists. Scott, Byron, Coleridge, and Keats were dead when Queen Victoria ascended the throne; but there still lived such poets as Wordsworth, Southey, Moore, and Landor, and later there came into prominence Robert Browning and his wife, Tennyson, the Poet Laureate, Philip James Bailey, Alexander Smith, Swinburne, Morris, Jean Inge-low, Dante Rossetti, and Christina Rossetti. {476}Punch, the world-renowned paper, was founded in this reign, and drew together some clever young writers, while among its illustrators were such famous artists as Doyle, Leech, and Tenniel. Then we come to the novelists. Who has not heard of Dickens and Thackeray, and enjoyed their works time and time again? Perhaps these two are the most familiar, to young people, of the English novelists of the present century; but we must mention besides Charles Reade, Anthony Trollope, Charlotte Bronte, Bulwer, Charles Kingsley, Black, Charles Lever, Miss Mulock, and Hardy. This very incomplete list of names, that suggest the various branches of literature, will serve to show that no century has produced so many men and women whose names deserve to be handed down to posterity as the present one.