which fills a furnace with fifty thousand pounds of molten iron, and conducts the red-hot stream to the enormous mould which is to produce a cylinder without a flaw. [Illustration: Cupids forging arrows. From Albani.] [Illustration: Coal-Railway from South Hetton to Seaham Harbour, with the ascending and descending Trains.] [20] See a table by Professor Ansted in the Great Exhibition Catalogue, vol. i. p. 181. CHAPTER XIII. Conveyance and extended use of coal--Consumption at various periods--Condition of the roads in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--Advantages of good roads--Want of roads in Australia--Turnpike-roads--Canals--Railway of 1680--Railway statistics. We have seen how by machinery more than thirty-five million tons of coal--now become one of the very first necessaries of life--are obtained, which without machinery could not be obtained at all in the thousandth part of the quantity; and which, consequently, would be a thousand times the price--would, in fact, be precious stones, instead of common fuel. Engines or machines, of some kind or other, not only keep the pits dry and raise the coals to the surface, but convey them to the ship upon railroads; the ship, itself a machine, carries them round all parts of the coast; barges and boats convey them along the rivers and canals; and, within these few years, railways have carried the coals of the north into remote places in the southern and other counties, where what was called "sea-coal," from its being carried coastwise, was scarcely known as an article of domestic use. The inhabitants of such places had no choice but to consume wood and turf for every domestic purpose.