476 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of a century than of a decade to get the storage battery in shape 

 for transatlantic working. 



But the railways would all be run by it, and arc and incan- 

 descent lamps would shine on the country roads and in rural 

 hamlets all along the distributing lines in the kingdom. The 

 reign of electricity would have set in, for Great Britain at least, 

 in a sense not realized at all as yet, though we speak of the pres- 

 ent as the age of electricity ; and the deadly smoke from Lon- 

 don, Manchester, and Liverpool chimneys would cease, with its 

 accompanying black and yellow fogs and consequent stagna- 

 tion of business and various kinds of illness. St. Paul's could 

 be cleaned up once for all and shine forth in its whiteness for 

 generations, instead of becoming again the grimy and disreput- 

 able-looking object that the soot from London's bituminous coal 

 has made it. 



It is hardly to be expected that the great work referred to will 

 actually be begun just yet, although it would be little more than 

 an even thing between the cost of this fifteen-mile dam and Man- 

 chester's thirty-five-mile ship canal, but it is one of the great 

 projects that the near future is likely to have in store, and all the 

 results I have foreshadowed are logical outcomes of it. The 

 length of time that the construction of such a work would re- 

 quire has been estimated at in the vicinity of three years, if prop- 

 erly pushed, and the cost would probably be something over one 

 hundred million dollars. 



Considering the thing from the broad standpoint of the change 

 in the whole geography of the British Isles which would follow 

 the construction of the isthmus, several most interesting and ex- 

 tremely important questions arise. As to whether these have 

 been all carefully investigated by the projectors of the proposed 

 enterprise I am not aware. In the first place, what would become 

 of the water which at present finds a vent through the Irish Chan- 

 nel in case this channel were stopped? It would presumably go 

 by the west coast of Ireland and a small part, perhaps, up round 

 by the north and east of Scotland ; and the question is, would this 

 have a salutary effect upon the west Irish coast, and would it 

 withdraw a part of the Gulf Stream's benign influence from Eng- 

 land and the east coast of Ireland ? The result of the work might 

 possibly show it to have been unwise to tamper with the natural 

 course of a main branch of that ocean current which is known to 

 have such an excellent influence on the climate and temperature 

 of the British Isles, which, as everybody knows, are as far north 

 as Labrador. The possibility reminds one of the story of the 

 Anglophobiac American who proposed cutting a canal through 

 Yucatan, or some such locality, in order that the Gulf Stream 

 might be nipped in the bud, so to speak, and never reach England 



