But what has this, it may be said, to do with the price of clothing? Exactly this: part of the price arises from the cost of transport. If there were no "lunar distances" in the 'Nautical Almanac,' or chronometers, the voyage from New York to Liverpool might require three months instead of a fortnight. But go a step farther back in the influence of science upon navigation. There was a time when ships could hardly venture to leave the shore. In the days of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, a merchant who went three times over sea with his own craft, was entitled to rank as a thegn, or nobleman. Long after this early period of England's navigation, voyages across the Atlantic could never have been attempted. That was before the invention of the mariner's compass; but even after that invention, when astronomy was not scientifically applied to navigation, long voyages were considered in the highest degree dangerous. The crews both of Vasco de Gama, who discovered the passage to India, and of Columbus, principally consisted of criminals, who were pardoned on condition of undertaking a service of such peril. The discovery of magnetism, however, changed the whole principle of navigation, and raised seamanship to a science. If the mariner's compass had not been invented, America could never have been discovered; and if America, and the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope, had never been discovered, cotton would never have been brought to England; and if cotton had never been brought to England, we should have been as badly off for clothing as the people of the middle ages, and the million of working men and women, manufacturers of cotton, and dealers in cotton goods, would have been without employment.