A new era has dawned upon our planet, and is advancing with accelerated force, with giant strides.

The railroads and the steamboats, with their progressive improvements in speed, safety and convenience, are extending and multiplying the means of travel, of trade, of association and intercommunications between countries whose inhabitants have been comparatively unknown to or estranged from each other.

But, as if even these means were too slow for the Godlike aspirations, the mighty throes of human thought and its struggles for light and expansion, man seizes the lightning, tames and subdues it, and makes it the bearer of his thoughts and dispatches. While these things are in progress by one portion of mankind, another learns to seize and control a sunbeam, in a manner subservient to the progress of the fine arts, and by which means a man performs in a minute the work which a short time since would have employed the most active years of a lifetime.