together by the bell would
be obviated, he said, by the contrivance, and a solidity given to the
work otherwise impossible in the circumstances: the stones could be laid
in his floating caisson with a care as deliberate as on the land. Some
of the anecdotes which he communicated to me on this occasion, connected
with his numerous achievements in weighing up foundered vessels, or in
floating off wrecked or stranded ones, were of singular interest; and I
regretted that they should not be recorded in an autobiographical
memoir. Not a few of them were humorously told, and curiously
illustrative of that general ignorance regarding the "strength of
materials" in which the scientific world has been too strangely suffered
to lie, in this the world's most mechanical age; so that what ought to
be questions of strict calculation are subjected to the guessings of a
mere common sense, far from adequate, in many cases, to their proper
resolution. "I once raised a vessel," said Mr. Bremner,--"a large
collier, chock-full of coal,--which an English projector had actually
engaged to raise with huge bags of India rubber, inflated with air. But
the bags, of course taxed far beyond their strength, collapsed or burst;
and so, when I succeeded in bringing the vessel up, through the
employment of more adequate means, I got not only ship and cargo, but
also a great deal of good India rubber to boot." Only a few months after
I enjoyed the pleasure of this interview with the Brindley of Scotland,
he was called south, to the achievement of his greatest feat in at least
one special department,--a feat generally recognized and appreciated as
the most herculean of its kind ever performed,--the raising and warping
off of the Great Britain steamer from her perilous bed in the sand of an
exposed bay on the coast of Ireland. I was conscious of a feeling of
sadness as, in parting with Mr. Bremner, I reflected, that a man so
singularly gifted should have been suffered to reach a period of life
very considerably advanced, in employments little suited to exert his
extraordinary faculties, and which persons of the ordinary type could
have performed as well. Napoleon,--himself possessed of great
genius,--could have estimated more adequately than our British rulers
the value of such a man. Had Mr. Bremner been born a Frenchman, he would
not now be the mere agent of a steam company, in a third-rate seaport
town.

The rain had ceased, but the evening was gloomy a