Out on those prairies beyond the forests I have seen this general statement of Mr. Hill's illustrated. Down from Lake Michigan the first railroad crept toward the Mississippi along the Des Plaines and then the Illinois, where La Salle had seen from his canoe great herds of buffalo "trampling by in ponderous columns or filing in long lines morning, noon, and night." That railroad was a path, not to any particular city but to the water, a path from water to water, a long portage from the lake to the Mississippi and back again. One day, within my memory, a new path was marked by stakes that led away from that river, off across the prairie, to an uninhabited place which the first engineers had not known--a place of fire, the fields of coal, of which the practical Joliet had found signs on his memorable journey. And so one and another road crossed that prairie (on which I can even now clearly see the first engine standing in the prairie-grass), making toward the places of fire, of wood, of grain, of meat, of gold, of iron, of lead, till the whole prairie was a network of these paths--and now the "transportation machine" (as Mr. Hill calls it) has grown to two hundred and fifty-four thousand seven hundred and thirty-two miles (in 1911), or about 40 per cent of the world mileage, of which one hundred and forty thousand miles are within the Mississippi Valley, carrying with them wherever they go the telegraph and telephone wires, building villages, towns, and cities-still bringing the fashions of Paris, as did Perrot, in the paths of the buffalo.