perfect manner need not exceed 800l. per mile, and the low cost is the true reason why engineers generally have not thought it worth while to turn their attention to them. The carriages should be nearly noiseless and free from vibration, in which case the dead weight may be materially lessened. The carriages, besides, must be capable of running on the ordinary road, and leaving the rails or running on them at the pleasure of the driver.
One argument against the system has been founded on the supposition of danger to the public by reason of a street-railway. This arises simply from the term “railway,” and the supposed speed involved. But the risk of a railway-omnibus is really far less than that of an ordinary omnibus, from the fact that it runs on a fixed track, and that passengers know what part of the road to avoid, and the breaks applied to the rail-omnibus afford the means of stopping much more rapidly.
With regard to the lines fit for these rails, they exist wherever omnibuses run. Two great radial centres are the Bank and the Obelisk. Others are the railway terminus, Paddington, to the Bank by the two routes—the City Road and Oxford Street and Holborn—Richmond and the line of road to Charing Cross—the line from the Bank to Epping Forest, which should be for ever kept as a wild park to Londoners, or as a ground for shooters to practice in. Across all the bridges to the Surrey hills, destined hereafter to become a southern London, and so in time to give the chance for the low swamps covered by unwholesome dwellings to be again converted to garden-ground.
Say that a thousand miles may be laid down with rails in London and its environs, what would be the best way of accomplishing it? The Parish trusts would not embark capital in it. But it would be a good speculation for a company of capitalists to furnish the rails, and lay them, and keep them in repair per mile, and thus enable the parishes to take a toll on the omnibuses, which would enable them to dispense with a paving rate. Or if they could not legally take a toll, they could make an equivalent bargain by transferring the cost of paving to the rail owners. Only let there be a will and the “way” will follow.
REPRESENTATIVE WOMEN.
Scientific Students.
caroline l. herschel; sophie germain; and mrs. somerville.
I am not aware whether others have made the observation, but it appears to me that the repugnance of our sex to “learned ladies” does not affect female mathematicians. Our jests are levelled at the literary women; and yet more, at the “philosophers,” or those who study psychology, in a German, French, or English form. I should say “jests were levelled,” but that there are still publications and men antiquated enough to attempt to keep up the old insolence and the old joke, after society in general has arrived at better taste; for the reason, possibly, that there are still women (a few in England, and not a few in America,) who are antiquated enough to make themselves foolish and disagreeable, instead of wise and companionable, through their pursuit of knowledge. I need not enlarge on this; for there is no pleasure, and at this time of day no profit in contemplating pedantry on the one hand, or scoffing on the other. I have referred to the old and worn-out topic only because it appears to me that if female mathematicians and physical discoverers have escaped the insults, and almost the criticism, bestowed on literary women half a century ago, it must be because their pursuits carry their own test with them. The attainments of such women are not a matter of opinion, but of fact. Man or woman may be mistaken about his or her comprehension of Kant’s apparatus of Conditions, or accuracy in the reading of dead languages; but there can be no deception of self or others as to the reality of knowledge in the science of Space and Numbers; or the detection of new agencies in Nature which can be brought to the test. Even where this is questioned, on account of the many false starts in discovery that have been made, up to this time, the doubt is, not about the reality of the knowledge, but the correctness of the inferences of the discoverer. On the whole, we may, I think, fairly say, that in the scientific departments of human knowledge women rank equally with men in respect of society. Whether they have equal access to that field of knowledge is another affair.
Let us look at two or three recently dead or still living, and see what aspects they present.
The senior of the three (German, French, and English), whom our own generation may have seen, was both a mathematician and a physical discoverer. Caroline Lucretia Herschel, the sister of Sir William Herschel, was the German. She was born at Hanover (March 16th, 1750), and lived there till she was one-and-twenty. She was sixteen, and her brother eight-and-twenty when he, in England, began to attend to astronomy; the whole family being supposed to be engrossed by music, as they were certainly devoted to it professionally. It is not, therefore, likely that Caroline was prepared by education for scientific pursuit in any other direction; and her taking it up at last, in order to assist her brother, seems to show that she had no original overmastering genius for science, such as must have taken her out of the ordinary conditions of female life, but that the labours of her life from that time forward were a merely natural exercise of perfectly natural powers. She came over to England as soon as she was old enough (one-and-twenty) to keep her brother’s house at Bath, where he was organist to a chapel. She was his helper and sympathiser in the astronomical pursuits which were his delight, as his best recreation from his professional business. She worked out his calculations when he had provided the elements: she watched with an anxiety like his own the production of the telescope he made because he could not afford to buy one; and when he discovered a planet, ten years after she had joined him, she enjoyed the triumph and its results very keenly. The King gave Brother William 300l. a year, and called him Astronomer to the Court; and the (then) bachelor brother and his staid sister removed to Slough, to do as they liked for the rest of their lives.
Thus far, it may be said that Caroline Herschel