Some correspondence, which has come to the Society, of the Mayor of Boston in April, 1851, in regard to the threat of a “tumult, riot, and mob” over a fugitive slave case, recalls the time when slavery was not only a very live issue, but one which split the North into two bitterly hostile camps. For years Boston abolitionists carried on their campaign in the midst of a community hardly more sympathetic with their views than the South itself.

A Scientific American of 1882 contains an article, with several illustrations, describing the gravity coal piers of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, at Hoboken, New Jersey. The enormous traffic in coal carried on at this port, says this author, requires broad, cheap and rapid methods of handling large quantities at once.

“Imagine a Yankee Rip van Winkle,” says Samuel Eliot Morison in his Maritime History of Massachusetts, “who had slept out his twenty years within hailing distance of the State House dome. As he looked about him in 1853 the most astonishing sight would be —, not the railroad, not the telegraph, not the steamship — but the clipper ship. During the last half of his sleep there had taken place the greatest revolution in naval architecture since the days of Hawkins and Drake. Below in Boston Harbor, and setting sail for a port whose name he had never heard, were vessels four and five times as large as any he had ever seen, with canvas five and six times the utmost area that the old Boston East-Indiamen dared spread to the lightest air.”