UNITED STATES. 49

rank high in their respective departments, as philo- sophers, authors, and artists.

The colleges, and other seminaries of learning in the United States, are respectable and numerous; and the diffusion of knowledge extensive and liberal.*

The Americans are certainly a reading people; particularly of ephemeral productions. There are upwards of eight hundred newspapers circulated throughout the United States, besides reviews, and a vast number of magazines. Nearly all the popu- lar works published in this country, and some im- ported from France and Germany, are reprinted with astonishing celerity, and dispersed all over the re- public.

The public works of the United States, among which we may notice Erie canal as the greatest, (being in length, with that branching from it to Lake Champlain, above four hundred miles,) have all been conducted with spirit; and from the rapid advances which the republic has made since the re- volution, we are only the more deeply involved in conjecture, the more we enquire into the probable height of its splendour, before it reach the acme of its power and grandeur. Those vast regions beyond the Alleghany mountains, the most extensive, fertile, and most eminently blessed with a natural inland navigation, of any country in the world, were scarcely known before the revolution. That country now possesses a great population, and all the rudiments

* Note H. VOL. I. D