Resources of the United States

22 swine, who play a very important part in consuming the large surplus of Indian corn, increased in number from 8,536,182 to 11,039,352, and the cattle from 4,373,712 to 7,204,810. Thanks to steam and the railway, the herds of cattle who feed on the meadows of the Upper Mississippi are now carried in four days, through eighteen degrees of longitude, to the slaughter-houses on the Atlantic. , It is difficult to furnish any visible or adequate measure for a mass of cereals so enormous as 558 millions of bushels. About one-fifth of the whole descends the chain of lakes on which 1,300 vessels are constantly employed in the season of navigation. About one-seventh of the whole finds its way to the ocean, through the Erie Canal, which has already been once enlarged for the purpose of passing vessels of two hundred tons, and is now under survey by the State of New York, for a second enlargement to pass vessels of five hundred tons. The vessels, called “ canal-boats,” now navigating the canal, exceed five thousand in number, and if placed in line, would be more than eighty miles in length. The barrels of wheat and flour alone, carried by the canal to the Hudson river, were in 1842 ...................... 1,146,292 1852 ...................... 3,937,366 1862 ...................... 7,516,397 A similar enlargement is also proposed for the canal connect- Lake Michigan with the Mississippi river. When both the works are completed, a barrel of flour can be carried from St. Louis to New York, nearly half across the Continent, for fifty cents, or a ton from the Iron Mountain of Missouri for five dollars. The moderate portion of the cereals that descends the Lakes, if placed in barrels of five bushels each, and side by side, would form a line five thousand miles long. The whole crop,

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