'The World on Wheels' is a series of essays about the author's ponderance about topics ranging as the use of wheels to the Iron Age. These thoughts were born out of a man named Benjamin F. Taylor, who was a war correspondent for Chicago newspapers outlets during the American Civil War. In regards to wheels, he has this to share: "In fact, it seems to be the tendency of everything to be a wheel. There's your tumbling dolphin, and there's your whirling world. The conqueror whose hurry set on fire the axles of his chariot was no novelty. Who knows that the Aurora Borealis and the Aurora Australis, lighting up the sky about the polar circles in the night-time, may not be the flashes from the glowing axles of the planet? Who knows that the ice and snow may not be piled up about the Arctic and Antarctic just to keep the flaming gudgeons as cool as possible? Does Sir John Franklin? Does anybody?"