led up to the height of from forty to fifty feet, placing the
surrounding country under water, and doing severe damage to the massive
stone buildings along the noble river front of the city. To resist so
prodigious a pressure, it was necessary that the piers of the proposed
bridge should be of the most solid and massive description. Their
foundations are placed in the solid rock; for none of the artificial
methods of obtaining foundations, suggested by some engineers for
cheapness' sake, were found practicable in this case. Where the force
exercised against the piers was likely to be so great, it was felt that
timber ice-breakers, timber or cast-iron piling, or even rubble-work,
would have proved but temporary expedients. The two centre piers are
eighteen feet wide, and the remaining twenty-two piers fifteen feet; to
arrest and break the ice, an inclined plane, composed of great blocks of
stone, was added to the up-river side of each pier--each block weighing
from seven to ten tons, and the whole were firmly clamped together with
iron rivets.

To convey some idea of the immense force which these piers are required
to resist, we may briefly describe the breaking up of the ice in March,
1858, while the bridge was under construction. Fourteen out of the
twenty-four piers were then finished, together with the formidable
abutments and approaches to the bridge. The ice in the river began to
show signs of weakness on the 29th March, but it was not until the 31st
that a general movement became observable, which continued for an hour,
when it suddenly stopped, and the water rose rapidly. On the following
day, at noon, a grand movement commenced; the waters rose about four feet
in two minutes, up to a level with many of the Montreal streets. The
fields of ice at the same time were suddenly elevated to an incredible
height; and so overwhelming were they in appearance, that crowds of the
townspeople, who had assembled on the quay to watch the progress of the
flood, ran for their lives. This movement lasted about twenty minutes,
during which the jammed ice destroyed several portions of the quay-wall,
grinding the hardest blocks to atoms. The embanked approaches to the
Victoria Bridge had tremendous forces to resist. In the full channel of
the stream, the ice in its passage between the piers was broken up by the
force of the blow immediately on its coming in contact with the
cutwaters. Sometimes thick sheets of ice were se