Syracusan port, and famine reigning in Egypt,
Hiero, the charitably disposed, embarked a cargo of ten thousand
huge jars of salted fish, two million pounds of salted meat, twenty
thousand bundles of different clothes, filled the hold with corn, and
consigned her to the seven mouths of the Nile, and since she weighed
anchor nothing more has been heard of her fate. The next great
ship worthy of mention is the mythical Saracen encountered in the
Mediterranean Sea by the crusading fleet of Richard CIur de Lion, Duke
of Guienne and King of England, which, after much slaughter and
damage incident to its infidel habit of vomiting Greek fire upon its
adversaries, was captured and sunk. Next in rotation appears the Great
Harry, built by Henry VIII., of England, and which careened in harbor
during the reign of his successor, under similar circumstances
to those attending the Royal George in 1782--a dispensation that
mysteriously appears to overhang a majority of the ocean-braving
constructions which, in defiance of every religious sailor's
superstition that the lumber he treads is naturally female, are
christened by a masculine or neutral title. In the year 1769, Mark
Isambard Brunel, the Edison of his age, as his son was the Ericsson
of that following, permitted himself to be born at Hacqueville; near
Rouen, France, went to school, to sea, and into politics; compromised
himself in the latter profession, and went to America in 1794, where
he surveyed the canal now connecting Lake Champlain with the Hudson
River at Albany, N.Y. There he turned architect, then returned to
Europe, settled, married, and was knighted in England. He occupied
eighteen years of his life in building an unproductive tunnel beneath
the river Thames at London; invented a method of shuffling cards
without using the hands, and several of her devices for dispensing
with labor, which, upon completion, were abandoned from economical
motives. On his decease, his son and heir, I.K. Brunel, whose
practical experience in the Thames Tunnel job, where his biographers
assert he had occasion more than once to save his life by swimming,
qualified him to tread in his father's shoes, took up his trade.
Brunel, Jr., having demonstrated by costly experiments, to the
successful proof, but thorough exasperation, of his moneyed backers,
that his father's theory for employing carbonic acid gas as a motive
power was practicable enough, but too expensive for anything but the
dissi