three times as quickly by machinery as by the
ordinary methods. The tunnel is excavated, by
machinery only, three metres high and three
metres wide; its final dimensions are intended
to be eight metres high and ten broad. By
what means it is to be so enlarged, still remains
undecided. During 1862, on an average, a
metre per day was excavated at each end, or
two metres altogether. The ten thousand
metres which remain to be excavated will
therefore, at that rate, take something like twelve
years to finish. Six years have already been
employed on the tunnel; the whole time of its
execution will consequently be eighteen years.
At first, it was expected to be finished in six
years. But eighteen years, a large portion of
the life of an individual, are as nothing in the
life of a nation. Many cathedrals and other
public monuments have taken a much longer
time to complete.

To supplant the old-fashioned borer, M.
Leschot has invented a tool which consists of a
metal ring studded with fragments of black
diamond—a harder variety than the ordinary
diamond—and which is therefore employed to
polish it. The ring, by means of a cylindrical
stem worked by machinery, is made to grind an
annular hole in the rock. When the hole is
nearly a yard deep, the tool is withdrawn, and
what remains inside the hole is easily extracted.
Thus a gem, usually employed for personal
decoration, has rendered industrial services, and
has become an auxiliary in the making of a
railway. Instead of employing diamond or
steel, Hannibal is said to have opened rocks by
the application of vinegar. All we can say is,
that the vinegar of that day must have been
considerably stronger than our own.

The latest intelligence informs us that the
public impatience is not likely to wait even ten
years for the completion of the Alpine tunnel;
but that, until it be finally opened, a temporary
and provisional railway is to be carried over the
mountain. The locomotives to be employed
were tried last winter in the Derbyshire hills,
and were found quite equal to the task of
scaling and descending the most rapid slopes of
Mont Cenis. The French government desires
to see the experiment made on its own territory,
and upon the very spot where it is to be
practically applied; it has accordingly authorised
the construction of a few kilometres of rail
between Lanslebourg and the summit of the
Cenis, in the steepest and most difficult part of
the whole line. This strip of rail is expected to
be completed in February next, at latest, when
trains will be run by way of trial. That time of
the year is usually the very worst for the
mountain, so that success then will be success
for ever.

The English capitalists and engineers who
have undertaken this mountain railway are
perfectly easy as to the result. The contractors
promise to convey, at all times of the year, a
train of from a hundred to a hundred and fifty
passengers, with their baggage, and the post-
office bags, in four and a half hours, from Susa
to St. Michel. They are to build tunnels or
covered galleries in places where danger of
avalanches renders it necessary. The difference
made to travellers will be immense. Both in
coming and going, the mountain would be
crossed by broad daylight, instead of in the dark,
as is now the case, and tourists would enjoy
the scenery at present completely lost to them.
Once fairly over the Cenis, the ambitious rail
will in future laugh at mountain impediments;
and it is expected that the example will be
extensively followed for the passage both of
Alps and Apennines, the more so as the cost
of these mountain lines is said very slightly
to exceed that of railways in the plain.

TALL PEOPLE.

THE same Professor Quetelet who weighed
all the people of whom he could get hold, to
ascertain against how many pounds avoirdupois
they could turn the scale,* has also measured
them with a foot rule, or metre standard, to
see what was their altitude, or longitude.
He adopted the same plan in the one case as
in the other. He obtained permission to
carry his weights and measures to certain
foundling hospitals, where there is always
more than a plentiful supply of children;
to barracks, where young men of the healthy
ages are congregated; to asylums, in which
there are examples of the weak and the aged,
counterbalancing the evidence furnished by the
young and healthy; to universities and schools,
where young fellows and hobble-de-hoys rule
the market; and to factories, in which sedentary
labour somewhat stunts the growth. These
he compared with groups of individuals living
in various places, and occupied in a great
diversity of employments, with a view to a fair
and candid deduction as to the average height
of full-grown persons. Giants and dwarfs he
cared nothing about, nor prodigies of any other
kind.
* See No. 191, page 352: Fat People.

Beginning with those very important personages,
the babies, M. Quetelet remarks, that,
"before Buffon, no inquiries had been made to
determine the rate of human growth,
successively from birth to maturity; and even this
celebrated naturalist cites only a single
particular example; neither has he examined the
modifying influences which age exerts on
height." M. Quetelet gives all the heights in
metres and decimals; but as we in England
have not yet got rid so completely of our
insular singularity as to imitate continental
nations in this particular, it may be well to
translate his measures into English feet and
inches, at the rate of (about) three feet three
inches and a half to the metre. Well, then,
children a day old are found to be about nineteen
inches long, some a little more, and some
a little less. The Foundling Hospital at Paris
agrees with that at Brussels in this average.