THE MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH.

New Zealander, Volume 2, Issue 102, 15 May 1847, Page 3

THE MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH.

What imagination can contemplate that mysterious agency of man's invention without being awed into reverence before Him who :nade man so wonderfully and fearfully, in endowing him with a capacity to work out such fetirful and wonderful things ? As much as any one have we familiarised our imagination with the prospective progressibility of the human mind. As sanguinely as any one have we believed in great things to be achieved in the geometric series of human progression. But the magnetic telegraph arises, like an extra mundane column, to indicate and end the furthest reach of finite mind. Our imagination dare not look beyond this monument of human genius for new conquests, or for a continuation of the linked series of its progression. Nay, we cannot even reach this in our conceptions, without a feeling of awe as if treading within the fearful jurisdiction of Omnipotence. We are Mot dealing in iancy ; they are stretching these ligthning lines over continents already. They are trailing them over the corol beds of seas ; down, down, among the black skeletons'of Flicuidiau argosies j shipwrecked on a Columbus voyage to Britain, and of a)l others that for three thousand years have gone down unrecorded in theKnglish Channel and the Straits of Dover. Paiibund London will soon be brought within the same whispering-gal-lery, and the ■' natural enintli/" between the two nations be lost for ever, in the unbroken current of friendly intercom se, in the local identity which these messagewires shall work, for them. On, on, they arc stretch-

ing the lighning trains of thought ; onward to the extremeSt the lightning trains of thought; onward to the extreinest hide ; over seas and deserts that have swallowed up ai'tnies and navies ; knitting the ends of the eaith together, and its inhabitants too, in the network of consentaneous sympathies, briuging the distant and half-explored continents of humanity, with all their tribes, tongues, colours, and conditions, within the ( onverse of an hour. Think of that a moment ! Com|>ii'S&ing the solid globe, of 24,000 miles in circumference, into a sociai circle of a do/.en furlongs girth ! it flnUtitinity keeps pace with commerce, will there not he a g>oi ions brotherhood, a nice family ciicle of mankind, by the time these literaiy lightnings t.lia'l be mounted ami running to and fro over the whole faith? Uut who aiv doing all thi-> ? Who else, to be sure, but th it uondeilul Anglo-Saxon race, which is diffusing itself, .mil itb genius over the world — that wonderful race which thiives better abroad than at home-con-forms to any climate or rondiuon,— whose language is fast absoibing or displ icing the spiritless tongues and dialect of the heathen world, in which millions of young Pagans in the far-off ocean isles,— From Greenland's icy mountains 'lo India's coral strands, and thence to the Yellow Sea, North and South American Indians, Polynesians, Australians, Hottentots, Egyptians, Hindoos, and Japanese, are now learning their fust lessons in civilization and Christianity. If iintish anil American Christians shall do their duty, the boy is at school who will live to see half the habitable surface of the globe covered with the Anglo Saxon race, and half the human family speaking the English language. The railway engines that shall thunder through the heart of Asia, Africa, and from Hudson's Bay to Patagonia, will speak and teach that lauguage, and so will the mounted lightnings and wire bridges of thought, which shall be erected for the converse of the worlds extremes.— Elihu Bumit,