"Messrs. Cunningham and Carter's Railway
Haulage Patents."

Whether the plan proposed by Messrs.
Cunningham and Carter be a good plan or a bad
plan, we are disqualified from asserting. To us
it presented itself simply as an ingenious idea
displayed in a model, pretty enough as a large
toy, and perhaps valuable as the sign of what
will hereafter be done in solid earnest. In
this spirit, with which we came away, neither
of hope nor of despondency, waiting for
verdicts of more value than our own, we propose
now to relate briefly what our eyes provided
us to tell.

There was in the corner of the cellar,
worked by steam, a substantial air-pump,
exhausting a main-pipe, which ran like a
little gas-pipe in the model by the side of the
very long table, or the miniature line of rail.
The pipe, at which the great engine is always
sucking, connects the great or mother engine
with a brood of little ones, attached in pairs,
one on each side of the line, and with a short
distance between pair and pair. Now these
little engines are air-engines. The touching
of a little spring opens a little vent, admits
the air into exhausted pipes, where its force
of course acts as the force of steam commonly
acts, and sets machinery in motion. The
machinery produces the revolution on each
side of wheels directed horizontally towards
the train. The arrival of a train touches a
spring, admits the air, and sets the machine
in motion. The wheels on each side revolve,
and gripping the train between them by a
line of rail fastened on purpose for them to
the carriages, they shoot the said train on.
It has no other motive power. It is not
dragged by a locomotive; but the lateral
wheels, fixed to the railway, playing upon
the train, they do the work. The last act of
a train, before leaving one pair of engines, is,
by touching a second spring, to shut out the
air it had admitted; and either a new pair of
wheels bites the train by its nose before its
tail has escaped from the last impetus, or
else these little stationary engines are so close
together, that the impulse communicated by
a first shoots the train to a second, where it
is again tossed on before its speed had
time to dwindle, as a shuttlecock in motion
might, by expert players, be made to run
along a line of battledores.

If it be requisite to stop, retard, or accelerate
the train, of course there is a break, but,
the chief agency depends upon the movement
of a handle, which increases or diminishes the
width between the lateral rails fixed to the
carriages, which fit into the wheels fixed to the
railway line. If these be contracted beyond a
certain point, they do not touch the wheels at
all, and the train soon stops for want of propelling
power. If they be expanded up to a certain
point, expansion increases the firmness of the
grip, and increases also the decision with
which the impulse is communicated by each
pair of engines; but beyond a certain point
expansion makes it more difficult for the train
to squeeze its way through, resistance is
created, and the train retarded in its speed.
Upon a circular railway in a corner of the
cellar, we saw trains revolving on this principle
incessantly, and upon the long line of
table, or railway, we saw all the various
contrivances put into play with perfect success.

How this application of the atmospheric
principle, so pretty in a model, would work in
the reality, we are not competent to say.
Our ignorance has various misgivings, but in
such matters, and many others, it would be an
excellent rule if all who are incompetent to
judge would refrain from the expression of a
judgment.

On the scale of nature there would be along
a line of railway one great air-pump every
ten miles, and the main-pipe of each would
then serve one hundred and fifty pairs of air-
engines moving the wheels, which, by contact
with the rails affixed to each side of the
carriages, give motion to the train. The air-
engines would, therefore, be stationed along
the whole line, at distances of one hundred
and fourteen yards apart. The trains would
be as they now are, with the side-rail
apparatus fitted to them, and the great steam-
horses, the locomotive engines, will follow the
fate of the coach-horses, whenever—if ever—
the present motive power is superseded by
Messrs. Cunningham and Carter's plan of
Haulage. The report of a civil engineer has
been placed in our hands, by which the pounds,
shillings, and pence account is calculated to
be very greatly indeed in favour of the new
plan.

When we had seen this, and heard much
more than this, we thought that we had spent
quite enough time in the bowels of the earth.
So we returned through the upholsterer's
shop into the enjoyment of as much sun as
usually shines in February on the pavement
of the City Road.

SENSITIVE PEOPLE

THERE are many ways of showing ourselves
sensitive, but we now have to dwell only upon
one. Some weeks ago (" Household Words,"
vol. iv., p. 403), we called attention—in an
article, entitled " New Discoveries in Ghosts"
—to the experiments of Baron Reichenbach
on people more than usually sensitive to the
impressions of odylic force. These people, in
rooms absolutely dark, see the odylic light
streaming from the poles of strong magnets, &c.;
and are acted upon, to a notable extent, by
odylic currents in the earth, and in human
or other bodies. We said—following Reichenbach's
first treatise—that he had found these
sensitives in hospitals chiefly, and among
people of peculiar nervous habit—one patient
was cataleptic; and that, occasionally, healthy
people had been found to manifest a high
degree of this species of sensibility.

By a competent authority, our attention is