Albany was completed, a passage was made through this pier for ferryboats, the bridges not being sufficient for the accommodation of travellers and freight. The pier was also soon covered with storehouses ; and when the Harlem and Hudson River Railways (the former skirting the western borders of Connecticut, eighteen or twenty miles east of the Hudson, and the latter following the river shore) were finished, and their termini were fixed at the point of that of the "Western Railway, the opening in the pier was widened, and ferry-boats made a passage through continually.

These roads, with the great Central Railway extending west from Albany, and others penetrating the country northward, together with the Champlain Canal, have made that city the focus of an immense trade and travel. The amount of property that reaches Albany by canal alone, is between two and three millions of tons annually ; of which almost a million of tons, chiefly in the various forms of timber, are the products of the forests. The timber trade of Albany is very extensive, amounting in value to between six or seven millions of dollars annually. Manufacturing is carried on there extensively ; and the little town of six thousand inhabitants, when it was made the State capital, about sixty years before, comprised in 1860 almost seventy thousand souls.

It is not within the scope of our plan of illustrating the Hudson to do more than offer a general outline of its various features, as exhibited in the forms of nature and the works of man. We leave to the statistician the task of giving in detail an account of the progress of towns and villages, in their industrial operations and the institutions of learning. AYe picture to the eye and mind only such prominent features as would naturally engage the obseivation of the tourist seeking recreation and incidental knowledge.