The wooden steamship, “copper-fastened and copper-bottomed,” etc., etc., is long since a thing of the past. The iron age, which succeeded the wooden, has been changed to steel, and steel may change to something else, and steam to electricity. Who knows? Mr. Maginnis, who is himself an engineer and an architect, speaks with authority when he says that, “Whether the improvements be in the ship or in the machinery, gradual advances will be made in the near future.” The thirst of competing steamship companies for conquest on the high seas—at any cost—and the ambition of ship-builders to improve upon the latest improvements, will not be satisfied with present attainments, even if it can be proved to a demonstration that thousands of additional horse-power and hundreds of additional tons of coal per day would be required to increase to any appreciable extent the maximum rate of speed that has already been reached. In the meantime some idea may be formed of the possible saving in the consumption of fuel when it is stated that, by a system of induced draught, discovered since the last two Cunarders were designed, the number of boilers necessary to generate steam enough for 30,000 indicated horse-power may be reduced to little more than one-half, which, to put it briefly, means a corresponding saving in space, weight and first cost.[1] In fact, well-informed marine engineers do not hesitate to express their opinion that the day is not far distant when Atlantic greyhounds may be coursing across the ocean at the rate of thirty knots an hour, bringing Queenstown and Sandy Hook within ninety-three hours of each other. It is difficult to form a correct idea, from any verbal or pictorial representation, of the elegance, the convenience and the comfort attaching to the “Express Steamship.” Nothing short of a voyage or voyages in one of these floating palaces would suffice to give an adequate conception of their excellence. And yet, when all is said that can be said in praise of the steamship, some of us “old stagers” can look back, if not with lingering regret, at least with pleasant recollection, to the days of the packet-ship, and even of the sailing vessel of humbler pretensions. Some of the early emigrant ships were certainly of a mean order, and many emigrants suffered cruel hardships before they reached their destination. It was not an uncommon thing for five or six hundred men, women and children to be huddled together indiscriminately in the hold of a vessel of from 250 to 300 tons, doomed to subsist on coarsest food, and liable to be immured beneath hatches for days or weeks at a time, without medical attendance, obliged to cook their own food, and scantily supplied with water; and all this for eight or ten weeks at a stretch!