undergoes a similar transformation; the table, having its legs pulled together, disappears in a corner, and two shelves being let down furnish two other berths. The freshest and whitest of linen and brightly-coloured blankets complete the outfit; and you undress and go to bed as you would at home.” An important general truth may find a familiar illustration in the subject now under notice. The truth in question may be expressed by saying that, in all human affairs, as well as in the operations of nature, the state of things at any one time is the result, by a sort of growth, of a preceding state of things. And in this way it is certainly true of inventions, that they never make their appearance suddenly in a complete and finished state—like Minerva, who is fabled to have sprung from the brain of Jupiter fully grown and completely armed; but rather their history resembles the slow and progressive process by which ordinary mortals attain to their full stature. We have already seen that railways had their origin in the tramways of collieries; and, in like manner, the railway carriage grew out of the colliery truck and the stage coach; for when railway carriages to convey passengers were first made, it did not occur to their designers that anything better could be done than to place coach bodies on the frame of the truck; and accordingly the early railway carriages were formed by mounting the body of a stage coach, or two or three such bodies side by side, on the timber framework which was supported by the flanged wheels. The cut, Fig. 56, is from a painting in the possession of the Connecticut Historical Society, and it represents the first railway train in America on its trial trip (1831), in which sixteen persons took part, who were then thought not a little courageous. Here we see that the carriages were regular stage coaches, and the same was the case in England. But it is very significant that, to this day, the stage coach bodies are traceable in many of the carriages now running on English lines, especially in the first-class carriages, where, in the curved lines of the mouldings which are supposed to ornament the outside, one may easily recognize the forms of the curved bodies of the stage coaches, although there is nothing whatever, in the real framing of the timbers of the railway carriage, which has the most distant relation to these curves. Then again, almost universally on English lines, the old stage coach door-handles are still retained on the first-class carriages, in the awkward flat oval plates of brass which fold down with a hinge. Many other points might be named which would show the persistence of the stage coach type on the English railways. The cut, Fig. 56, proves that the Americans set out with the same style of carriages; but North America, as compared with the Old World, is _par excellence_ the country of rapid developments, and there carriages, or cars, as our