and cuts inflicted by the ponderous iron work, the splinters and the enormous weight of the train. * * * A great many of the dead had evidently been asleep; the majority of them had taken off their boots and coats in the endeavor to make themselves as comfortable as possible. They lay heaped upon one another like sacks, dressed in the traditional blue clothing of the German people. * * * A child was got at and removed nine hours after the accident, being uninjured in its dead mother's arms." The accident happened at 2 A.M., and before sundown of the next day 86 bodies had been taken out of the canal; others were subsequently recovered, and yet more died from their hurts. The injured were numbered by hundreds. It was altogether a disaster of the most appalling description, in extenuation of which nothing was to be said. It befell, however, a body of comparatively friendless emigrants, and excited not a tithe of the painful interest which yet attaches to the similar accident to the Boston express at Norwalk. These terrible disasters were both due, not alone to the carelessness of the two engine-drivers, but to the use of a crude and inadequate system of signals. It so happened, however, that the legislature of Connecticut was unfortunately in session at the time of the Norwalk disaster, and consequently the public panic and indignation took shape in a law compelling every train on the railroads of that state to come to a dead stand-still before entering upon any bridge in which there was a draw. This law is still in force, and from time to time, as after the New Hamburg catastrophe, an unreasoning clamor is raised for it in other states. In point of fact it imposes a most absurd, unnecessary and annoying delay on travel, and rests upon the Connecticut statute book a curious illustration of what usually happens when legislators undertake to incorporate running railroad regulations into the statutes-at-large. It is of a par with another law, which has for more than twenty-five years been in force in Connecticut's sister state of Massachusetts, compelling in all cases where the tracks of different companies cross each other at a level the trains of each company to stop before reaching the crossing, and then to pass over it slowly. The danger of collision at crossings is undoubtedly much greater than that of going through open draws. Precautions against danger in each case are unquestionably proper and they cannot be too perfect, but to have recourse to stopping either in the one case or the other simply reveals an utter ignorance of the great advance which has been made in railroad signals and the science of interlocking. In both these cases it is, indeed, entitled to just about the same degree of respect as would be a proposal to recur to pioneer engines as a means of preventing accidents to night trains.