How deftly, by the by, Burton picks up the distinction between an inland city, living by handicraft, and a port city, handling weighty materials and feeding freely on commerce! His livers by their finger-ends are especially "those within the land." Just so the great capital of France, arbitrarily concentred amongst her provinces, and deprived of a port, can only thrive by her exceptional genius in fine and easily-moved _articles de Paris_. The site now under our consideration, however, means to have no such one-sided success. If her horoscope be not cast amiss, this American Glasgow will both make whatever human ingenuity can make, and she will also distribute. One of the first things she intends to do is to tap the stream of food, fuel and lumber destined for the South, and now laid up in the winter in Philadelphia by the closing of the Delaware, and send it to the Southern consumer by her cheap water-transport. Connected with this enterprise will be the multiplication of her steam colliers, ultimately scattering the crop of breadstuffs to the South Atlantic and Gulf States (if not the Eastern), and coming home with ballast of the varied iron ores those States abound in. When Delaware Bay begins to be whitened with the sails of returning coal-vessels, or lashed with the wheels of steam carriers, bringing in the oxides and magnetite ores of North Carolina and the hematite and other varieties of the extreme South, to mix with the rail-brought ores of interior localities, then Wilmington proposes to be the chosen centre of industry in cast iron. This production, it is now well understood, is no longer carried on most advantageously in the neighborhood of any one great natural deposit of ore. The important thing is to be at a meeting of all varieties of the metal: chemistry then selects the proportions for mixture, and the best stock is produced with scarcely any greater expense than the lowest grade. The situation at the head of Delaware Bay is one where every choice of the ores can be easily swept together by rail or water. It also controls fuel, by both means of carriage, from either of the great anthracite regions--a matter of special importance in this time of "strikes," as the operatives of both districts rarely throw up work at the same time. Wilmington thus proposes to obtain its iron at three dollars per ton less than Pittsburg. [Illustration: PARLOR-MATCH FACTORY.] To properly digest these advantages, the city needs a large furnace, centrally located, to work for all the foundries and forges of the place. This construction is now being earnestly advocated, and will doubtless soon take form. Thus we see the northernmost of the slave-State cities leaping up to catch first the advantages of perfect commercial union under the new regime. Affiliated with the South, inspired by the North, we should watch her as a standard and a type.