been considering. He was sent by his father for six months to Edinburgh University, and he turned this brief period of college education to excellent advantage. On his return from Edinburgh, one of his first employments was to assist his father in the survey of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, entering the figures, while his father took the sights. Then he was engaged on the more difficult task of scheming out the line, of which we have spoken, between Liverpool and Manchester over Chat Moss.

whose intelligence and perse-engineering triumph we have just verance we owe the introduction of railways into England, and who set the first example in this country of works which others have successfully carried into execution throughout the world. From his earliest years he had cherished an ardent love for | natural history. The latter days of his life were spent on an estate in Derbyshire, adjacent | to the Midland Railway, where, engaged in horticulture and farming, he lived amongst his rabbits, dogs, and birds. He died of an intermittent fever, on the 12th of August 1848, at the not very advanced age of sixtyseven, leaving behind him the highest character for simplicity, kindness of heart, and absolute freedom from all sordidness of disposition.

In summing up the character of the subject of his memoir, Mr. Smiles makes two remarks well worth bearing in mind: '1. The whole secret of Mr. Stephenson's success in life was his careful improvement of his time, out of which fortunes are carved and characters formed. 2. His mind was always full of the work in hand. He gave himself thoroughly up to it. Whatever he was engaged upon, he was as careful of the details as if each were itself the whole. He did all thoroughly and honestly.'

ROBERT STEPHENSON.

Robert Stephenson was the son of George Stephenson, whose

In 1824 he went to South America to superintend some mining operations in Columbia; but finding life there dull and unsatisfactory, and his father writing that his help was urgently required at home, he returned to England after an absence of three years, and assumed the management of a locomotive factory which had been set up at Newcastle.

There he con

structed the Rocket, that celebrated engine which won the prize of £500 at the competition at Rainhill in 1829, and established the efficiency of the locomotive for working the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, and indeed all future railways.

His next great undertaking was the formation of the railway between London and Birmingham, a work of prodigious difficulty and anxiety. In examining the country to ascertain the best line, he walked the whole

ruined by their contracts, which were re-let to others at advanced prices, or were carried on and finished by the company.'

The skill with which Robert Stephenson overcame obstacles between London and Birmingham, established his reputation. beyond cavil, and projectors thought themselves fortunate who could secure his name, and he had only to propose his own terms to obtain them. In one session of Parliament he appeared as engineer for no fewer than thirty-three new schemes. His work was enormous, and his income larger than ever fell to any of his profession.

distance between London and Birmingham upwards of twenty times. Long tunnels and miles of deep excavation had to be driven through unknown strata. The business of railway making was new, and those who contracted for its execution seldom came to any good. Speaking of the difficulties encountered during the construction of this line, Robert Stephenson observed: 'After the works were let, wages rose, the prices of materials of all kinds rose, and the contractors, many of them men of comparatively small capital, were thrown on their beam-ends. Their calculations as to expenses and profits were His business did not, howcompletely upset. Let me just ever, fall into easy routine: he go over the list. There was was continually called to exerJackson, who took the Primrose cise his genius by surmounting Hill contract he failed. Then difficulties hitherto unattempted there was the next length-by engineers. He designed Nowells; then Copeland and the Royal Border Bridge which Harding; north of them Towns-crosses the Tweed at Berwick, end, who had the Iring cutting; next Stoke Hammond; then Lyers; then Hughes: I think all of these broke down, or at least were helped through by the directors. Then there was that terrible contract of the Kilsby tunnel, which broke the Nowells, and killed one of them. The contractors to the north of Kilsby were more fortunate, though some of them pulled through with the greatest difficulty. Of the eighteen contracts in which the line was originally let, only seven were completed by the original contractors, Eleven firms were

and the High-Level Bridge over the Tyne at Newcastle, both of which are marvellous and beautiful works; but as engineer to the Chester and Holyhead Railway he won his chief triumph, in carrying the line through tubular bridges over the Straits of Menai and the estuary of the Conway.

These Welsh works cost him intense thought and anxiety. When he had got the first tube floated at Conway, and saw all safe, he said, 'Now I shall go to bed!' The Britannia Bridge over the Straits gave him still more trouble. It was,' he said,

viding for him a smooth way through the country, across val

over rivers, or even arms of the sea. Yet for boldness of design, science of construction, and successful completion, the gigantic engineering works executed in connection with our railways greatly surpass, in point of magnitude as well as utility, those of any former age.'

'a most anxious and harassing time with me. Often at night I would lie tossing about, seek-leys, under hills, upon bogs, ing sleep in vain. The tubes filled my head. I went to bed with them, and got up with them. In the grey of the morning, when I looked across the square, it seemed an immense distance across to the houses on the opposite side. It was nearly the same length as the space of my tubular bridge!' When the first tube had been floated, a friend remarked to him: This great work has made you ten years older.' 'I have not slept sound,' he replied, for three weeks.'

The tubular bridge he repeated on a grander scale in the Victoria Bridge across the St. Lawrence at Montreal; and in two bridges across the Nile, he varied his plan by running the line upon the tubes instead of within them.

'The traveller by railway,' says a writer in the Quarterly Review, 'sees comparatively little of the formidable character of the works along which he is carried. His object is merely to pass over a given space in the shortest time and with the greatest comfort. He scarcely bestows a thought upon the amount of hard work that has been done, the anxieties that have been borne, the skill and contrivance that have been exercised, and the difficulties that have been overcome, in proNo. 34 Grosvenor Square, Hyde Park, London, where he lived.

It is a remarkable proof-to add a few words here on the subject of engineering generally-of the practical ability of the English people, that the greatest engineering works of the last century have been designed and executed for the most part by self-educated men. Down to quite a recent date, there was no college or school for engineers in this country, and some of the most eminent practitioners had not even the benefit of ordinary day-school instruction. Brindley was first a day-labourer; John Rennie, a farmer's son, apprenticed to a millwright; George Stephenson, a brakesman and engineman. Probably no training would have made them greater than they were. dowed with abundant genius and perseverance, their best education was habitual encounter with difficulties.

En

It is also worthy of note, that although the English have latterly eclipsed all other nations in engineering, it was the last of the practical sciences, as we pointed out in the beginning of