[105] It might have been used in the same way in Italy in the first century, had not the grandiose taste for aqueducts prevailed.
[106] And also into the Cornwall mines, be it noted.
[107] Captain Thomas Savery (1650?-1715). An English engineer who made one of the first steam engines in 1705, working in connection with Thomas Newcome.
[108] James Watt (1736-1819). A Scotch inventor who in 1765 perfected the condensing steam engine.
[109] Palæoferric creature. Ancient iron creature.
[110] Cul-de-sac. A passage closed at one end.
[111] Utopian. In 1516 Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) wrote about an island called Utopia on which was an ideal government. The word “Utopian” means “ideal beyond hope of attainment”.
[112] Nemine contradicente. No one saying anything against it.
[113] It might be worse. If the biggest horses had been Shetland ponies, we should be traveling now in railway carriages to hold two each side at a maximum speed of perhaps twenty miles an hour. There is hardly any reason, beyond this tradition of the horse, why the railway carriage should not be even nine or ten feet wide, the width that is, of the smallest room in which people can live in comfort, hung on such springs and wheels as would effectually destroy all vibration, and furnished with all the equipment of comfortable chambers.