many hundred thousand cubic yards of
"stuff"' have had to be removed in making our
largest tunnels: and it is not necessary to say
that the time and labour thus consumed must
be enormous. The point to ascertain is, whether
there can be a machine invented which
can dig when the soil is soft and earthy, and
another which can quarry when the soil is
hard and rocky. There was a digging and
excavating machine introduced a few years
ago, in which a kind of enormous scuttle was
urged by steam power to scoop a path for
itself through a hill or mountain; perhaps,
it did not answer, for we have lost sight of it
during the last few years.

The Americans seem determined not to
continue to bore tunnels in the manner adopted
in the old country. A new machine was
adopted, a year or so ago, by the North American
Coal Company, near Pottsville, in Pennsylvania,
for boring down to a seam of bituminous
coal called the Big White Ash Vein.
The bore-hole was four or five inches in
diameter, and was bored at the rate of about
two feet in an hour. The machine was so
arranged that ten drills could be worked in a
certain space at one time by any motive
power; and the débris was washed up by a
current of water from a pump worked by
the same engine. The sinking or boreing of
artesian wells seems to be one main object of
the inventor of this machine; but the drills
appear to be capable of working horizontally
also, for the American scientific journals
talk of a cutting bored by this machine in the
face of a granite rock, twenty four feet in
diameter.

Another new American borer is described
as having been invented and fabricated at
Hartford. There is, in the first place, a
steam-engine of sixty-horse power; this
moves four piston rods horizontally; these
rods move four stout half-circle plates, and
these plates are set with revolving blades. The
four blades are set upon a revolving plate
ten feet in diameter; and the movements of
the whole are such that the revolving knives
or cutters, each running a quarter of a circle,
cut a circular ring seventeen feet in diameter,
and also cut a hole in the centre. We are
not quite certain whether a third machine
has not been invented, still more recently,
from which wonders are anticipated in relation
to the boring of railway tunnels through
solid rock.

Of all bores, one of the strangest, if it
ever come to anything, will be the purposed
tunnel or tube to be laid along the bed of a
river or sea, or at any rate to be immersed in
the water of the river or sea—not like the
Thames Tunnel, with water above it only, but
with water above and below, and on either
side of it. There is an enterprising individual
who bids us act as follows. Make, says he,
at your factory, or where you will, a tunnel
or tube of strong plates of iron; strengthen it
at intervals with girders of considerable
thickness; adjust all the parts one to another,
but take them in pieces to the water-side;
get your diving-workers or working-
divers ready clothed in diving dresses, to
prepare the bed or bottom of the river or sea
for the reception of the tube; join all the
pieces to make a perfect tube; float this tube
to its proper place; sink it by letting in water:
then pump out the water; and lastly, finish
your roadway or railway through this
subaqueous tunnel. All this seems very easy
upon paper, perhaps—and indeed, easy or
not, it will not do, in the present age, to
talk about the impossibility of any schemes;
but the Coming Man is the most likely man
we know, to run along a railway at the
bottom of the sea.

But what a work will the Alpine tunnel be,
should capital aid, and should war not impede
the bold plan of the engineer! Glancing at
a map of the region which separates Italy
from France and Switzerland, it is at once
apparent how formidable are the difficulties
which an engineer must contend against, in
any attempt to connect the railway system of
central Europe with that of Italy. A crescent
of mountains on the west, and a line of
mountains on the north, seem to forbid all passage.
The maritime Alps join the Apennines near
Genoa, and the two together cut off Genoa,
Nice, and Piedmont;—all three being portions
of the Kingdom of Sardinia. It was hard work
to establish a railway connection between
Turin and Genoa, by cutting and tunneling
through and across this mountain barrier; and
then, when so far done, what to do next? When
in Piedmont, how to find a path for the
locomotive into France or Switzerland? There
are Mont Viso, and Mont Geneva, and Mont
Cenis, and the Little Saint Bernard, and Mont
Blanc, and the continuous ridge of which
these mountains constitute the conspicuous
summits, presenting a formidable barrier
along the western margin of Piedmont; while
there are the Great Saint Bernard, and Mont
Cervin, and Mont Rosa, and the Simplon, and
the Grimsel, and the Saint Gothard, and the
Saint Bernard, forming, with their connecting
ridges a still more forbidding barrier on the
north. Thus, if all Italian and German
jealousies could cease; if Sardinian Piedmont
and Austrian Lombardy could become one
in feeling, and could establish ways of travel
that would be available for both; the mountain
obstacles would still have to be contended
against. The Splugen, the Stelvio, the
Ortler Spitz, the Brenner, the Gross Glokner,
and the portions of the Alps which connect
them, would still intervene between Italy on
the one hand, and Switzerland and Central
Europe on the other.

Among various routes proposed for crossing
these Alpine obstructions, one which has
occupied attention for two or three years past,
has been brought forward by the Chevalier
Mans. He selects a point between Mont
Cenis and Mont Geneva, in that part of the