bridge is a
parallel example for length, but the truss is different.

The dikes and jetties of the new embouchure of the Meuse embrace the
same features of extending a river's banks into deep water, and by
confining the stream making it scour out its own bed, as now so
successfully practised by Captain Eads in one of the passes of the
Mississippi River. Limbs and saplings made into gabions and staked
together form mattresses, and by loading with stone are sunk in
position. They soon become silted up, and are practically solid. Others
are made and laid upon them _ad libitum_, and at last raise the crest
above the level of the sea, the last course being laid with the
advantage of high-water spring tides. This foundation supports courses
of pitched masonry on its side, and these protect the stone or gravel
embankment, which forms a roadbed. The river's water, instead of, as
formerly, depositing its silt at the embouchure as its motion is
arrested on reaching the open sea, carries its silt along and deposits
it farther out: if a favorable shore-current occurs, it is swept away
laterally, and so disposed of.

The maritime canal of Amsterdam is another late success of this
remarkable people, which leads the world in dikes and drainage of low
lands, as the Italian does in the art and area of irrigation. The
present canal may satisfy the great and still rising commerce of
Amsterdam, the previous ship-canal, fifty-one miles in length, built in
1819-25 at a cost of $4,250,000, and deep and wide enough to float two
passing frigates, having proved insufficient.

Belgium is happily situated, and well provided by Nature and art to
enter into any competitive trial. With admirable skill, great provision
of iron and coal and a people of economical habits that permit them to
work at low wages without being impoverished, she is, besides working
up her own abundant material, rolling the iron of England into rails,
and making it into locomotives for Great Britain, whose own people lack
the work thus done abroad. The "Societe Cockerill-Seraing" has an
enormous space devoted to the machinery for the exploitation of iron.
Compressed forgings in car-wheels and other shapes are piled on the
floor, and a whole railway rail-rolling mill train is shown in motion.
Two of the rolls are stated to have rolled 10,500 tons of steel rails,
and are in apparent good order yet.

[Illustration: WHEELOCK'S AUTOMATIC CUT-OFF STEAM-ENGINE.]

The Belgium s