Art and architecture have embellished its banks by lovely gardens, parterres and magnificent residences and stately buildings. Attractive villages, great and prosperous cities crown the Hudson from the north and terminating in that unique, wonderful, greatest, truly cosmopolitan city of the world, New York. Nothing else did so much to produce these results as Fulton’s application of steam to navigation and the opening up of a through water transportation route from the Atlantic to the Great lakes. Then the application of steam as the motive power for railroads. When the Hudson river is ice-bound the Hudson River Railroad along its east bank and the West Shore Railroad along its west bank transport passengers and freight as they do the year around. The Dutch possession of the New Netherlands was short and when the English supplanted them the Dutch names of places, very generally, were changed to English ones. Manhattan island, called by the Dutch “New Amsterdam” during their rule, except from July, 1673, to October, 1674, when the Dutch recaptured and held the “New Netherlands” and called it “New Orange,” was changed to New York in honor of the Duke of York and Albany, and has borne that name ever since—a city of many millions of inhabitants and billions of wealth, the site of which was bought by and for the Dutch of the Indians in 1626 for the sum of about twenty-four dollars paid for in trinkets. Among many other good things placed to the credit of the Dutch in New Netherlands is the fact that the Dutch West India Company established a good school in New Amsterdam in 1633 which still flourishes under the name of the “School of the Collegiate Reformed Church,” which is the oldest institution of learning in the United States, “The Boston Latin School,” established in 1635, being the second, and Harvard College, established in 1636, the third. The names of the site of Albany which, during Dutch rule, were Rensselaerwyck and Beverwyck (the latter including Fort Orange, built and maintained by the Dutch West India Company, and the land surrounding it, and the former the territory outside of the fort and belonging to the Patroon) were substituted by the name of Albany in honor of the Duke of York and Albany, a name it has borne ever since. In 1783 the English colonies in North America were recognized as free and independent and formed the United States of America—the colonies organizing State governments—but 100 years before this the colony of New York demanded heaven-born rights and participation in making the laws governing them as the colonists of Virginia and Massachusetts had, and in the General Assembly of the colony of New York, held in Fort James in the city of New York October, 1683, put on record what they called the “Charter of Liberties and Privileges.”