efforts; and to assure them that I shall be happy at any time to sit for my portrait for them, or to accept the handsome service of plate, which I am told they have prepared for me, but feel too much delicacy to speak to me about. I remain, with the highest respect and esteem for myself and everybody else, JOHN PHOENIX, A.M., Chief Engineer and Astronomer, S. F. A. M. D. C. R. The annexed sketch of our route, prepared by Messrs. Jinkins and Kraut, is respectfully submitted to the public. It is not, of course, compiled with that accuracy, which will characterize our final maps, but for the ordinary purposes of travel, will be found sufficiently correct. J. P., A. M. C. E. & C. A. A NEW SYSTEM OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR I HAVE often thought that the adjectives of the English language were not sufficiently definite for the purpose of description. They have but three degrees of comparison-a very insufficient number, certainly, when we consider that they are to be applied to a thousand objects, which, though of the same general class or quality, differ from each other by a thousand different shades or degrees of the same peculiarity. Thus, though there are three hundred and sixty-five days in a year, all of which must, from the nature of things, differ from each other in the matter of climate, —we have but half a dozen expressions to convey to one another our ideas of this inequality. We say"It is a fine day;" "It is a very fine day;" "It is the finest day we have seen;" or, "It is an pleasant day;" "A very unpleasant day;" "The most unpleasant day we ever saw.' But it is plain, that none of these expressions give an exact idea of the nature of the day, and the two superlative expressions are generally untrue. I once heard a un gentleman remark, on a rainy, snowy, windy and (in the ordinary English language) indescribable day, that it was "most preposterous weather." He came nearer to giving a correct idea of it, than he could have done by any ordinary mode of expression; but his description was not sufficiently definite. Again: we say of a lady-" She is beautiful;" "She is very beautiful," or " She is perfectly beautiful;"-descriptions, which, to one who never saw her, are no descriptions at all, for among thousands of women he has seen, probably no two are equally beautiful; and as to a perfectly beautiful woman, he knows that no such being was ever created-unless by G. P. R. James, for one of the two horsemen to fall in love with, and marry at the end of the second volume. If I meet Smith in the street, and ask him—as I am pretty sure to do" How he does?" he infallibly replies " Tolerable, thank you"-which gives me no exact idea of Smith's health-for he has made the same reply to me on a hundred different occasionson every one of which there must have been some slight shade of difference in his physical economy, and of course a corresponding change in his feelings. To a man of a mathematical turn of mind—to a student and lover of the exact sciences these inaccu |