The building is surmounted by a dome supported by several small Ionic columns, and bearing upon its crown a wooden statue of Themis, the goddess of justice and law. Within it are halls for the two branches of the State legislature (Senate and General Assembly), an executive chamber for the official use of the Governor, an apartment for the Adjutant-General, and rooms for the use of the higher state courts.

Immediately in the rear of the Capitol is the building containing the State library, which includes nearly forty thousand volumes, and some valuable manuscripts. It is a free, but not a circulating, library.

Albany contained only about six thousand inhabitants when it was

THE HUDSON.

made the State capital, and its progress in business and population was very slow until the successful establishment of steam-boat navigation on the Hudson, and the completion of that stupendous work of internal improvement, the Erie Canal, by which the greatest of the inland seas of the United States (Lake Erie, Huron, Michigan, and Superior) were connected by navigable waters with the Atlantic Ocean, through the

Hudson lliver. The idea of such connection had occupied the minds of sagacious men for many years, foremost among whom Avcre Elkanah Watson, General Philip Schuyler, Christopher Colles, and Gouverneur Morris ; and thirty years before the great work was commenced, Joel 15arlow, one of the early American poets, wrote in his Vision of Columbus --

" He saw as widel}- spreads the imchannelled plain, Where inland realms for ages bloomed in vain, Canals, long winding, ope a watery flight. And distant streams, and seas, and lakes unite.