Stephenson's was a very different apparatus. In its general principle it resembled Davy's, the chief difference being, that he inserted a glass cylinder inside the wire-gauze cylinder, and inside the top of the glass cylinder a perforated metallic chimney--the supply of air being kept up through a triple circle of small holes in the bottom. Stephenson's claim has, of course, been disputed by the friends and admirers of Sir Humphrey Davy; but Mr. Smile has conclusively proved that his lamp, the "Geordy," was in use at the Killingworth collieries at the very time that Davy was conducting the experiments which led to his invention. It is not to be inferred, however, that Davy knew aught of what Stephenson had accomplished. It seems to be one of those rare cases in which two minds, working independently, and unknown each to the other, have both arrived simultaneously at the same result. Penny Postage. SIR ROWLAND HILL. Penny Postage. "He comes, the herald of a noisy world, News from all nations lumb'ring at his back,-- Houses in ashes, and the fall of stocks; Births, deaths, and marriages; epistles wet With tears that trickled down the writer's cheeks Fast as the periods of his fluent quill; Or charged with am'rous sighs of absent swains, Or nymphs responsive." COWPER. The growth of the postal system is a sure measure of the progress of industry, commerce, education, and all that goes to make up the sum of civilization; and there is no more striking illustration to be found of the strides which our country has made in that direction since the century began than the introduction of a cheap and rapid delivery of letters, and the craving which it has at once satisfied and augmented. Nothing gives us so forcible an idea of the difference between the Britain of the present day and the Britain of the Stuart or even of the Georgian period, than the contrast between the postal communication of these times and of our own. The itch of writing is now so strong in us, we are so constantly writing or receiving letters, our appetite for them is so ravenous, that we wonder how people got on in the days when the postman was the exclusive messenger of the king, and when even majesty was so badly served that, as one old postmaster[D] wrote in self-exculpation of some delay, "when placards are sent (to order the immediate forwarding of some state despatches) the constables many times be fayne to take the horses oute of plowes and cartes, wherein," he gravely adds, "can be no extreme diligence." It was a sure sign that the country was going ahead when Cromwell (1656) found it worth while to establish posts for the people at large, and was able to farm out the post office for L10,000 a year. The profits of that establishment were doubled by the time the Stuarts returned to the throne, and more than