d toward Fontenay-aux-Roses; but |
orcet's weak legs, after nine months'
disuse of exercise, were little suited for
a walk, and it was three o'clock ere he
ed the country-house of his brother-
mician, Suard. They had been intimate
is for more than twenty years-as the
spondence shows. Madame Suard,
ister to the great publisher Pancouke),
be said to have been an important mem-
f the philosophical sect; she was much
è confidence of Voltaire, and had often
of great use to him as well as to his
and successors. M. Suard appears to
kept himself as much as possible aloof
the troubles of the recent time; it is
able that Condorcet had selected him
e friend who might afford him shelter
limited space and then set him on with
eedful appliances of purse and passport,
e minimum cost of hazard to himself.
of the biographers asserts that Condor-
ad no design of asking the Suards to
him even for a night-that he was at
., as he had been at 10 A. M., annoyed
the want of his snuff-box, and intended
ore than to borrow one and proceed.
rago says the accounts are so discordant
1st decline to offer any opinion. It is
d, however, that Condorcet dismissed
Sarret at M. Suard's door, which seems
ove that he considered his travels as
for that day at any rate-and further-editor of the Memoirs of 1824 has a little
that M. Suard lent him a snuff-box-
Horace! The rest of the ascertained
nstances are few. How long he stayed
hese friends is not one of them--but he
his night's lodgings among the neigh-
5 quarries of Clamart. Some reporters
hat, though M. and Madame Suard
it necessary not to retain him under
roof, they let him out by a postern in
garden, assured him that both that
and a little summer-house adjoining
I be left on the latch, and were much
ssed next morning to find no signs of
ving been in the summer-house. What
ne Vernet says is, we may be very
rue-that her front door, back door,
de door were all on the latch during a
and that on one of the days she walked
ntenay-aux-Roses, and loitered for
about M. Suard's premises-but re-
without having received (probably
it having ventured to ask for) any in-

village of Clamart, and describing himself as
a carpenter out of work, called for an omelet.
His address excited doubts, which were
strengthened by a little observation of his
hands, but especially when, being asked how
many eggs should be put in the pan, he
answered a dozen-and then proceeded to
eat the mess with the eagerness of a famish-
ing man, but still with a certain aristocratic
management of spoon and fork.
He was
recommended to the notice of the village
authorities, who considered the Latin book
(on which he had written some notes with
his pencil) an insufficient substitute for a
passport; so he was immediately arrested
and sent toward Paris. One of his limbs
was now in a very helpless state, and a vine-
dresser, seeing him limping along between a
couple of officers, kindly offered the use of
his horse, which was accepted and allowed.
It was dark, however, ere they got as far as
the little prison at Bourg-la-Reine, and here
the sergeants deposited him for the night.
When the jailer entered his cell on the
morning of the 8th, he was a corpse. "He
had swallowed," says Arago, "a concen-
trated poison which he had carried about with
him for some years in a ring; what it was is
not known, but it is understood that that of
which Napoleon wished to make use at Fon-
tainebleau in 1814 was of the same composi-
tion, and dated from the same epoch." The

more on this point. According to him, in
the tempestuous summer of 1792, the Car-
dinal de Brienne, formerly prime minister to
the King, though he had voted at some elec-
tions of Sens, with the bonnet rouge (not
that of his ecclesiastical rank) upon his head,
was greeted with such looks and cries that
he never recovered his nerve. He requested
Condorcet to procure him the means of self-
destruction in case of need - Condorcet
obtained the prescription of an eminent phy-
sician-gave the Cardinal enough for his
purpose (which was soon afterward enacted),
and retained a dose for himself. Condorcet
was only in his 51st year.

"Thus died a man who honored Science by his works, France by his high qualities, the human family by his virtues."

So originally ended M. Arago's Biographie, and so it still ends; but it has now a tail

| Luxembourg, which it seems caused a vertigo the ex-secretary of the Academy, must be out of the account, for I believe they were not that time visible from the Rue Servandoni-an can affirm positively that they were entirely invi ble from any window of Madame Vernet's hou I will add, that if Condorcet's passion had be for hearing the flow of waters,' he must ha been ill-inspired when he directed his steps Fontenay-aux-Roses-a flat locality where the existed neither a river nor even the smallest bro and where in fact he could have no chance of he ing the flow of waters unless in the moment of heavy shower."

ha

in a beautiful work," by Madame O'Connor, who had read its two first volumes with natural eagerness, and laid them down with natural indignation, as she found her father misrepresented wherever he was named. Not doubting that M. Lamartine had, from mere haste, allowed himself to follow the hints of obscure traducers, Arago communicated to him Madame O'Connor's remarks and replies, which he received "avec cette bienveillance fascinatrice (the italics are Arago's) dont toutes ses connaissances ont éprouvé les affets. He even did me the honor to request a perusal of my Life of M. Arago proceeds, however, to say th Condorcet, as yet in MS.; and I need not M. de Lamartine's "inexactitudes say that I immediately complied with a re- had one good consequence: they led him quest so flattering to me." The result, how-hunt out some surviving acquaintance ever, is, that M. de Lamartine has neither in Sarret's, and one of these possessed a co subsequent revisions of his earlier volumes, of Sarret's own little Traité d'Arithmétiq nor in any epilogue or appendix, modified in the preface to which volume he had given one of the divers passages.' full and precise account of the incidents wi which he was so creditably connected. Fro this evidence it appears that "on the eveni before Condorcet quitted his asylum," a m called there on pretext of looking for lod ings, but whose very particular questions a remarks soon betrayed that he had son different errand. Among other things, mentioned searches then going on for sa petre; and observed, that whoever had a valuables would do well to look to them, f that the agents of this inquest were not t most scrupulous people in the world." Co dorcet, his door being ajar, heard the who of this, and did not conceal the impressi it made on him. M. Sarret does not dou

We do not imagine our readers would thank us for going into most of the details of this controversy between the two illustrious colleagues of the Institute and of the Provisional Government; but we make room for one topic the treatment of the escape of the 5th of April, 1794. M. Arago had bestowed all due pains on the history of that incident. M. de Lamartine takes it up in his character of historical romancer:

Condorcet," says he, "might have been happy and saved, if he could but have waited; but the impatience of his ardent imagination exhausted and destroyed him. He was seized on the return of spring, and at the reverberation of the April sun against the walls of his chamber, with such a

craving for liberty and movement, such a passion for beholding once more nature and the sky, that Madame Vernet was forced to watch him like a real prisoner, lest he should escape from her benevolent care. He could speak of nothing but the delight of roaming among the fields, of sitting under the shade of a tree, of listening to the song of birds, the murmur of leaves, the flow of waters. The first verdure of the trees of the Luxembourg, which his window had a glimpse of, carried this thirst for air and motion to an actual delirium."

In dealing with these "puerilities," as he does not scruple to call them, M. Arago begins as becomes a man of exact science.

'If," says he, “Condorcet had been dominated by the desire of seating himself under a tree and listening to the murmur of leaves, he could have found that satisfaction without quitting Madame

that the stranger was some well-wisher—a he adds, that in point of fact next morning post brought a letter to Condorcet, witho signature, but expressly warning him th the house was to be searched that very d

there being a suspicion that it harbor fugitives from the south: which letter w found on his table after he had fled. M. Arago's summing up is

"On ne trouve point, comme on voit, da cette relation aucune trace de l'impatience juv nile qui, suivant M. de Lamartine, amena la déplorable de Condorcet."

Certainly not; but the result will astoni the Histoire des Girondins. Nor, we mu no one who has bestowed any attention add, is there any perversion of fact even that meretricious farrago more gross th

From the Dublin University Magazine.

THE WONDERS OF MODERN LOCOMOTION.

HEN the political storms which are agi-, communication by land is the lateness of gnations shall have subsided-when their date. While all other departments of revolutionary madness shall have gone the useful arts were advancing with giant gh its appointed phases-when its strides, the art of transport was comparars and promoters, raised to a factitious tively stationary. We select some curious tion, and surrounded with a spurious examples, quoted in the work just referred rity, shall have been reduced to their to, of the state of land-traveling in Great er stature, and divested of their false Britain within a period so recent as the last dor, by the inexorable sentence of a dis- seventy years :onate posterity-one monument raised e present generation will stand, coming a respect and admiration which cannot diminish nor revolutions reverse. RAILWAY and the LOCOMOTIVE Will r forever memorable the nineteenth ry.

ny talk flippantly enough of the wonvrought in our time by the application discoveries of physical science to the vement of the art of transport; few, ver, are in a condition to estimate the dous extent of what has been actually plished in the advancement of that art ious parts of the globe, and still less of will probably have been realized before ird quarter of the present century shall xpired. We propose in this article to t the reader with a rapid sketch of of the most striking examples of these provements which have been made in ernal communication on the Continent rope and in the United States. Our necessarily preclude details; but those curiosity may be awakened, and whose t may be excited by what we shall may slake their thirst at the same n from which we have, for the most erived our information.*

of the most striking circumstances atthe improvements in the art of inter

ailway Economy: a Treatise on the new Art

"Until the middle of the eighteenth century, most of the merchandise which was conveyed from place to place in Scotland was transported on pack-horses; but when it was necessary to carry merchandise between distant places, a cart was used. The time required by the common carriers to complete their journey seems, when compared with our present standard of speed, quite incredible. Thus, it is recorded that the carrier between Selkirk and Edinburgh, a dishis journey, going and returning. In 1678, a tance of thirty-eight miles, required a fortnight for contract was made to establish a coach for passengers between Edinburgh and Glasgow, a distance of forty-four miles. This coach was to be drawn by six horses, and the journey between the two places, to and fro, was engaged to be completed in six days. Even so recently as the year 1750, the stage-coach from Edinburgh to Glasgow this present year, 1849, the same journey is made, took thirty-six hours to make the journey. In by a route three miles longer, in one hour and a half!

“In the year 1763 there was but one stagecoach between Edinburgh and London. This started once a month from each of these cities. It took a fortnight to perform the journey. At the same epoch the journey between London and York required four days.

66

In 1763, the number of passengers conveyed by the coaches between London and Edinburgh could not have exceeded about twenty-five monthly, and by all means of conveyance whatever did not exceed fifty. The intercourse between London and Edinburgh in 1835 was one hundred and sixty times greater than in 1763. "At present the intercourse is increased in a

26

range of language, terms sufficiently expressive | it were not attested by undeniable stat to describe this infernal road. Let me most seriously caution all travelers who may accidentally propose to travel this terrible country to avoid it as they would the devil, for a thousand to one they break their necks or their limbs by overthrows or breakings down. They will here meet with ruts, which I actually measured, four feet deep, and floating with mud, only from a wet summer. What, therefore, must it be after a winter? The only mending it receives is tumbling in some loose stones, which serve no other purpose than jolting a carriage in the most intolerable manner. These are not merely opinions, but facts; for I actually passed three carts broken down in these eighteen miles of execrable memory.'

"He says of a road near Warrington, 'This is a paved road, most infamously bad. Any person would imagine the people of the country had made it with a view to immediate destruction! for the breadth is only sufficient for one carriage; consequently it is cut at once into ruts; and you may easily conceive what a break-down, dislocating road, ruts cut through a pavement must be.'

"He says of a road near Newcastle, 'A more dreadful road cannot be imagined. I was obliged to hire two men at one place to support my from overturning. Let me persuade all travelers chaise to avoid this terrible country, which must either dislocate their bones with broken pavements, or bury them in muddy sand.'"-pp. 32-34.

It would be difficult to find, in the history of human progress, a fact more striking than that pointed out by the author of "Railway Economy," that the precise ground traveled -over by Young is now literally reticulated with railways, over which tens of thousands of passengers are transported daily at a speed varying from thirty to fifty miles an hour!

The augmentation of the internal intercourse which necessarily followed the construction of railways, forms one of the most extraordinary facts in statistics. Before the opening of the railway between Liverpool and Manchester, the number of passengers, daily, between those places, did not exceed four hundred. Immediately after the facility of railway transport was present, the number amounted to 1600! Nor was this increase merely a sudden change, succeeded by a stationary, or a nearly stationary, rate of intercourse. The public did not at once understand the value and importance of the facilities of intercourse thus presented. They were, however, more and more justly appreciated, from year to year, and we find ac

cordi

cal evidence. In 1843, the number of sengers booked on the railways of the Un Kingdom was, in round numbers, twe three and a half millions. In 1848, it lions per month, or about 170,000 per d to sixty millions!-that is to say, five ous analysis of this vast intercourse of The work before us supplies a very c individuals forming the hive of British in try and enterprise. half the total number of passengers are It appears that ab the third class, and that only one eighth the whole belong to the first class. might naturally have been supposed, t a fact as unexpected as it is important. the affluent classes, the bourgeoisie and th who are raised above subsistence on of railway passengers. We have before mere wages of labor, would form the sta tablish the reverse. "facts and figures" which incontestibly The laborious class, penny-a-milers, form, after all, the gi customers of the railway proprietors.

Thi

P

the inferior class may travel in greater n But it may be supposed, that althou bers, this may be more than compensated the greater distances traveled by the su rior classes. Here again, however, our p average distances traveled by third class visions are delusive. True it is, that less than those traveled by first class sengers: but this difference bears no p portion to the enormous difference of number of travelers of the two classes spectively. Taking the number and d third class passengers supply from forty-t tances traveled together, it is found that the raliways; while the first class pass to forty-three per cent. of the business gers alone supply less than twenty per ce of it.

may learn a useful lesson. This is not From facts like those, railway direct first unlooked-for truth which experience disclosed.

when railways were first projected, pass It will not be forgotten, th ger-traffic was never seriously contemplate and grave engineering authorities declare that no sane person could contemplate t practicability of traveling upon them at great a speed as twelve miles an hours!

light on the volume before us are, the ave Among the noticeable facts brought age distances traveled by different classes

nassengers