PREFACE
TO
THE FIFTH EDITION.
This volume should more properly be called a new work than a new edition of the former one. In fact the book has been almost rewritten. The change which has taken place, even in the short period which has elapsed since the publication of the first edition, in the relation of the steam engine to the useful arts, has been so considerable as to render this inevitable.
The great extension of railroads, and the increasing number of projects which have been brought forward for new lines connecting various points of the kingdom, as well as the extension of steam navigation, not only through the seas and channels surrounding and intersecting these islands, and throughout other parts of Europe, but through the larger waters which are interposed between our dominions in the East and the countries of Egypt and Syria, have conferred so much interest on the application of steam to transport, that I have thought it adviseable to extend the limits of the present edition considerably beyond those of the last. The chapter on railroads has been enlarged and improved. Three chapters have been added. The twelfth chapter contains a view of steam navigation; the thirteenth contains several important points connected with the economy of steam power, which, when this work was first published, would not have offered sufficient interest to justify their admission into a popular treatise; and the fourteenth chapter contains a series of compendious maxims, for the instruction and guidance of persons desirous of making investments or speculating in railway property.
London, December, 1835.