Excerpt from Railways and Locomotion It is, perhaps, unnecessary to adduce examples of inventions of which the origin and early history are entirely unknown; we may well suppose some of the arts of life to have been taught to man, not devised by him; we know that the use of skins for clothing was the subject of Divine suggestion. The ark, which may possibly have been the model for the earliest ships, was built by the directions of the Almighty. The common implements of husbandry, the management of horses, the use of wheeled chariots and waggons, the measurement of time, - all these date from a period of the world's history so remote that we are constrained to regard them with a degree of doubt, whether they may not have been born with the mind, rather than discovered by its powers. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.