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Updated: May 10, 2025
They constructed the tunnel under the Tower of London 1,350 feet in length and seven feet in diameter which penetrated compact clay and was completed within a period of eleven months. This was a remarkable record in tunnel building for the time and won for these eminent engineers a world wide fame. From thenceforth their system came into vogue in all soft soil and subaqueous tunneling.
Consideration of subaqueous works necessarily leads the mind to appliances for diving, and although its date is considerably anterior to 1862, I feel tempted, as I believe the construction is known to very few of our members, to say a few words about the diving apparatus known as the "Bateau-plongeur," and used at the "barrage" on the Nile.
Stripped of their branches, and sharpened to a point by the action of the water, and bent sloping by the current, they formed, as it were, huge invisible subaqueous chevaux de frise, on which steamers going up stream frequently impaled themselves, and this often to the destruction of the ship and great loss of life.
These slow oscillations of land surfaces being understood, many geological enigmas were made clear such as the alternation of marine and fresh-water formations in a vertical series, which Cuvier and Brongniart had observed near Paris; or the sandwiching of layers of coal, of subaerial formation, between layers of subaqueous clay or sandstone, which may be observed everywhere in the coal measures.
Many of the subaqueous plants expanded and retracted their blossoms harmoniously, as if to the strains of music audible only to the mute denizens of the sea a measured, waving dance, fantastic and wondrously beautiful.
The lines between New York and New Orleans are frequently connected together by means of transferrers, and direct communication is had over a distance of more than, two thousand miles. No perceptible retardation of the current takes place; on the contrary, the lines so connected work as successfully as when divided into shorter circuits. This is not the case with subaqueous lines.
"But apathy, and serfdom, and kinghood, and dominion, drain the fountain of its living springs, and the soul becomes like the plummet of lead, whose only tendency is to hide itself in subaqueous mud and unsavoury slush." Subaqueous mud and unsavoury slush!
The greatest partly subaqueous tunnels in the world are now to be found in the vicinity of New York. The first to be opened to the public is known as the Subway and extends from the northern limits of the City in Westchester County to Brooklyn.
Remains of thousands of species of animals and plants, as perfectly recognizable as those of existing forms of life which you meet with in museums, or as the shells which you pick up upon the seabeach, have been embedded in the ancient sands, or muds, or limestones, just as they are being embedded now, in sandy, or clayey, or calcareous subaqueous deposits.
It is still a question whether any of these subaqueous repositories of ancient relics in Switzerland go back so far in time as the kitchen-middens of Denmark, for in these last there are no domesticated animals except the dog, and no signs of the cultivation of wheat or barley; whereas we have seen that, in one of the oldest of the Swiss settlements, at Wangen, no less than three cereals make their appearance, with four kinds of domestic animals.
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