The invention of dynamite marks an epoch in the history of civilization. In judging of the degrees of culture of a people, we are guided to a great extent by the kind of roads and waterways they have constructed, and by the facility with which they have obtained metals and applied them to the arts. The Romans constructed excellent roads on the level, but in the mountains they could only make narrow and very steep paths. Canals and cuttings were made with great sacrifice and labor, and only where the soil was soft. Thus Suetonius states that in order to make a cutting about three miles long to drain the Lacus Fucinus, the Emperor Claudius employed 30,000 men for eleven years. In the sixteenth century road making and mining were scarcely more advanced. It took 150 years, ending with 1685, to mine five miles of gallery in the Hartz mountains. Although blasting with gunpowder dates back to the seventeenth century, it did not come into general use until about the middle of the eighteenth century, at which time the total cubage mined in Great Britain amounted to little more than of a large railway cutting at the present day. The use of gunpowder gave a great impetus to mining and public works, but it was only the introduction of railways, and the necessity of laying the lines on easy gradients, which raised blasting to a science. The introduction of dynamite, thrice as powerful as gunpowder and much more reliable, entirely revolutionized that science, and made it possible to execute the gigantic engineering works of our time, and brought about that prodigious development of the mining industry of the world which we have witnessed since 1870. Nobel Profits by an Accident.