In most of our manufactories it may but too truly be said that “the workmanship exceeds the materials.” Before a common coffin-nail can be made, the bowels of the earth must be ransacked, ores raised in Cornwall must be smelted in Wales by coals which have been excavated, raised, carted, recarted, &c. The amount of labour which has been expended in the fabrication of every trifling commodity exhibited in our shops is in a similar manner almost incalculable: indeed if our countrywomen did but know how many hours of unwholesome and unremitting application have been required, nay, how many constitutions have been ruined, in the fabrication of the light beautiful dresses and trinkets that adorn their persons, they would surely feel that their dance, delightful as it may have appeared to them, has been that of death to many of the poorest of their sex. Even the tedious details of the trifling volume we are writing prove that, while the public are luxuriously flying along the rails of only one arterial railway, an army of upwards of ten thousand workmen are labouring in a variety of ways for the management, protection, and maintenance of the way; and as we were not insensible of the usual necessity for these details, we certainly did expect to find that a proportionate amount of labour would be requisite for the simultaneous transmission of messages with extraordinary velocity to distances from one to upwards of four hundred miles. Simplicity, however, is the characteristic of science, and certainly the attics or garrets of the London Central Telegraph Station strikingly illustrate the truth of the axiom: indeed the whole of the Company’s stock in trade which we found therein consisted of four or five intelligent-looking boys, from fourteen to fifteen years of age, and eight little “_instruments_,” each about half the size of those which German women and Italian men carry on their backs through our streets; and as our advertising horse-dealers, in offering, or, as it is technically termed, in _chaunting_ their cob to the notice of “a heavy timid gentleman,” invariably assure him “that a child can ride it,” so it may truly be said of the electric telegraph, which transmits its intelligence at the incomprehensible rate of 280,000 miles _per second_, that _a boy can guide it_! Although the ordinary rate at which electric communication is now effected has above been easily expressed by a few figures, it is evident that it is a velocity which the human mind has not power to comprehend. When Shakspeare, in the exercise of his unbounded imagination, made Puck, in obedience to Oberon’s order to him-- “be here again Ere the leviathan can swim a league,” reply-- “I’ll put a girdle round the earth In forty minutes”-- how little did our immortal bard think that this light, fanciful offer of “a fairy” to “the king of the fairies,” would, in the 19th century, not only be substantially realised, but surpassed as follows.