250 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
will be one tunnel down within 200 or 300 feet of the banks of the river. Thence 
under the river there will be two tunnels—one for trains into the city, and one 
for trains from the city. Each tunnel will be about twenty-two feet in height by 
twenty feet in width in the clear, and circular in form. The outer shell of the 
tunnels is boiler iron, breaking joints and firmly riveted together, and within 
this iron tube will be a two foot wall of hard burnt brick, laid in cement, and ex- 
tending completely around the interior, presenting the form of an arch against 
any outside pressure, whether vertical or lateral. The track for railroad trains 
will lie about forty feet below the bed of the river, and near the New York side, 
where the depth of water is about sixty feet; the traveler in a car under the Hud- 
son will be about roo feet below the vessel overhead. The company’s officers 
say that they can dispatch 400 trains through the tunnel every twenty-four hours. 
The engineers vary very widely in their estimates of the cost of the enterprise, 
some fancying that the $10,000,000 capital will complete the work, and others 
that it will cost as much as $17,000,000. The company expect to complete the 
work about three years hence. —K. C. Zimes. 
PERIHELIA. 
People will discuss the wonders of the universe, and just in proportion as the 
phenomena are mysterious will they see signs and believe in the occult influences 
of the stars. And just now the perihelion of the four great planets, Jupiter, Sa- 
turn, Neptune and Uranus, is a source of vague dread to millions of people. It 
is true they are approaching their nearest position to the sun, and what is to be in 
that regard has not happened in eighteen hundred years. But history furnishes 
nothing coincident with similar occurrences to cause any dread now, though we 
must conclude that the influence which must be exerted between sun and planets 
to keep them in their places and govern their movements, will be more intense in 
action when nearest together, than when separated by the tremendous distances 
of the outer boundaries of their orbits. Neptune, the most distant of all the 
planets from the sun, requires 164 years to complete its circuit, while Jupiter re- 
quires less than one-twelfth of that time. 
But, then, similar stellar perihelia as to other planets have occurred, the last 
one of any note being in 1708, and following years. But this was not marked by 
any unusual phenomena, and there is no reason to suppose it will be so in the case 
of these four. The distances of Uranus and Neptune and in fact both the others 
are so great as to preclude the supposition that the influences from them will be 
any m re marked than in like positions of inferior but nearer planets. 
There is, in fact, nothing upon which to ground apprehension or to find cause 
for any baneful results from these planetary conjunctions, or that they even exer- 
cise a sway upon the meteorological conditions of our earth, ‘Their perturbing 
force seems limited to a slight alteration of the elliptical orbit of the earth, and 
beyond this they do not appear to affect our little world, but, like all large 
bodies toward small ones, are complacent and kindly disposed.—&. C. Journal. 
