languages, aided in both by the first men in London in their branches.
Four or five years of this training gave him, as he says in his
autobiography, the "_rudiments_" of his profession. His father next
determined to give him some experience in bearing responsibility, and
placed him as an assistant to the resident-engineer of Waterloo Bridge,
then in course of construction. He was but nineteen years of age; but,
being the son of the head of the firm, he was naturally deferred to and
prepared to take the lead. Soon after, the Southwark Bridge was begun,
which the young man superintended daily at every stage of its
construction.

English engineers regard this bridge as the _ne plus ultra_ of
bridge-building. A recent writer speaks of it as "confessedly unrivaled
as regards its colossal proportions, its architectural effect, or the
general simplicity and massive character of its details." It crosses the
river by three arches, of which the central one has a span of two
hundred and forty feet, and it is built at a place where the river at
high tide is thirty-six feet deep. The cost of this bridge was four
millions of dollars, and it required five years to build it. The bridge
is of iron, and contains a great many devices originated by the young
engineer, and sanctioned by his father. It was he also who first, in
recent times, learned how to transport masses of stone of twenty-five
tons weight, used for the foundation of bridges.

Having thus become an accomplished engineer, his wise old father sent
him on a long tour, which lasted more than two years, in the course of
which he inspected all the great works, both of the ancients and
moderns, in Europe, and the more accessible parts of Africa and Asia.
Returning home, the death of his father suddenly placed upon his
shoulders the most extensive and difficult engineering business in Great
Britain. But with such a training, under such a father, and inheriting
so many traditional methods, he proved equal to the position, continued
the great works begun by his father, and carried them on to successful
completion.

His father had already convinced the government that the old London
Bridge could never be made sufficient for the traffic, or unobstructive
to the navigation. A bridge has existed at this spot since the year 928,
and some of the timbers of the original structure were still sound in
1824, when work upon the new bridge was begun.

Thirty firms competed for the contrac