154 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



point of the coast from west to east, he says it had been again and 

 again pronounced impossible to build it, because stone was not to be 

 obtained. There were no quarries, it was alleged, nearer than Lake 

 Timsah or Suez, and quarry-stones could not be dragged one hundred 

 or even fifty miles across the desert. It turned out that there were 

 quarries near Alexandria, whence the stone might have been brought 

 by sea. The contractors, however, as the historian of the canal tells 

 us, " fell back on their own resources " ; they manufactured the stone 

 on the spot. The artificial blocks thus compounded were two thirds 

 sand and one third hydraulic lime. Each weighed over twenty tons, 

 and nearly thirty thousand were manufactured and tumbled into the 

 sea. We are assured that " the whole has continued as firm as any 

 structure of the kind in Europe, and is consolidating with every 

 year." 



The not carefully considered prediction of the " Edinburgh Re- 

 view " is almost without significance when compared with others made 

 in the House of Commons by Robert Stephenson and Lord Palmer- 

 ston. If not the first, Mr. Stephenson was one of the first, of Eng- 

 lish engineers. In a debate, in .June, 1858, Lord Palmerston referred 

 to the scheme as " the greatest bubble that had ever been sought to 

 be imposed on the credulity of the public." The canal, Mr. Stephen- 

 son averred, was " physically impossible." It was a mistake to talk of 

 a canal. " It would be simply a ditch. . . . How could a canal be dug 

 eighty miles long, without drinking-water along its course?" But 

 the project, supposed to be so impracticable, did not deserve this sort 

 of treatment. Within thirteen years of inauguration it paid seven- 

 teen per cent. That such predictions were falsified, and in so signal, 

 even grotesque a fashion, was due, in part at least, to the inventive 

 capacity, the constructive talent, which the undertaking called forth. 

 Upon Laval ley and Couvreux, as well as upon De Lesseps, it devolved 

 to show that ditches might be made serviceable, and a financial 

 " bubble " converted into an astonishing success. 



The part of our subject now examined serves, strictly speaking, 

 as an introduction to what in a special sense we have to consider — 

 the work at Panama and connection of inventions with it. Of the 

 three enterprises to which attention has been directed, one — that at 

 Suez — bears a close analogy, both as to the use for which it was built 

 and the character of the machinery employed, to the enterprise at 

 Panama. Such an analogy we do not meet, if we set alongside the 

 case of the tunnels and that of the American enterprise, although 

 from one point of view the work in them resembled more closely that 

 at Panama than that at Suez. In the case of the tunnels, blasting was 

 the regular ])rocess, hardly a foot was excavated without it ; and a very 

 considerable amount of blasting is required at Panama. Visitors to 

 the works have in fact compared the explosions heard for miles along 

 the excavation to musketry-discharges in battle. In respect to the 



