These things, if borne in mind, will serve to throw into stronger
relief the things that an automobile can do, and to supply a
substantial basis for the premise that, at least in some respects, the
automobile is the most marvelous machine the world has yet seen. It can
go anywhere at any time, floundering through two feet of snow, ford any
stream that isn't deep enough to drown out the magneto, triumph over
mud axle deep, jump fences, and cavort over plowed ground at fifteen
miles an hour. It has been used with brilliant success in various kinds
of hunting, including coyote coursing on the prairies of Colorado,
where it can run all around the bronco, formerly in favor, since it
never runs any risk of breaking a leg in a prairie-dog hole. Educated
automobiles have been trained to shell corn, saw wood, pump water,
churn, plow, and, in short, do anything required of them except figure
out where the consumer gets off under the new tariff law.

But to get back to the subject of speed, as automobile talk always
does, the supremacy of the motor-car has been established by so many
official records that any attempt to select the most striking only
results in bewilderment. The best that can be done is to recite a few
representative ones.

That was a most interesting illustration, for instance, of the capacity
for sustained high speed made by a Stearns car on the mile track at
Brighton Beach in 1910. In twenty-four hours the car covered the
amazing distance of 1,253 miles, which was at the average speed of
52-1/5 miles per hour. This record is all the more remarkable from the
fact the car was not a racer, but a stock car which had been driven for
some months by its owner before it was borrowed for the race, and did
not have any special preparation. The men who drove it were not
notified that their services were wanted until the morning of the race.