In the Memoirs of Bulstrode Whitlocke, the following anecdote is told as illustrative of the erroneous notions formerly entertained as to the Employment of Machinery for purposes of economy. “The advantage of free competition, and the inexhaustible resources of new inventions, contrivances, and appliances were,” it is observed by the editor at that time (1658), “utterly ignored. The Swedish ambassador” (to the court of Oliver Cromwell) “seems to have had a gleam of the truth, a dawning consciousness of how desirable it was to economise human labour by introducing machinery whenever practicable. He told a pleasant story of the Czar and a Dutchman; and how the latter, observing the boats passing upon the Volga to be manned with three hundred men in each boat, who, in a storm and high wind, held the bottom of the sails down with their hands, offered to the former a mode of manning each boat quite as efficiently with thirty men instead of the three hundred, by which the cost of transport would be lessened. But the Emperor called him a knave; and asked him if a boat that now went with three hundred men should be brought to go as well with thirty only, how were the other two hundred and seventy men to get their living?” Cromwell, it will be remembered, protected by Act of Parliament a sawmill erected in his time, it is imagined, on the site of the Belvidere-road, Lambeth; in which locality at this day there is probably more sawing by machinery than in any other part of England. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ World-Knowledge. ---------------------------- MISCELLANEA. ENERGY and force of character are among the first requisites essential to success in business. A man may possess a high degree of refinement, large stores of knowledge, and even a well-disciplined mind; but if he is destitute of this one principle, which may be termed resolution of soul, he is like a watch without a mainspring—beautiful, but inefficient, and unfit for service.