The Sun.
London, England, 1860-09-10 00:00:00

menu was a stuy.i.• -6 . ANZLICILaJtiso ..,..,....+ w.., ... r_ ___ ____
his Royal Highness, on -which in gilt letters was
inscribed the rather premature inscription, ." To
our hopeful King." On the upper galleries of the
building was a splendid display of furs and skins
in every stage of preparation, and a gallery of
Canadian pictures, in which, among others of a
much lower order of merit, were several very fine
works. Some of the waterfalls and forest scenery
were portrayed with a freedom and depth of colour
which would have done credit to any collection in
England,
During the whole time the Prince was making his
tour the applause of ladies and cheering of gentle-
men never stopped, and only slackened down at in-
tervals to break out with redoubled ardour. His
[ Royal Highness then returned to the dais, and Sir
Edmund Head, in compliance with the Prince's wish
declared the Industrial Exhibition of Montreal to
be formally opened, and his Royal Highness retired.
Then came a general and rapid rush for carriages
and vehicles of every kind, for the opening of the
Victoria Bridge was to take place in about an
hour afterwards, and the two points of interest
were just sufficiently wide apart to make it
doubtful whether these who left the Exhibition last
would be able to reach the bridge in time. Perhaps,
as a sufferer, I am prejudiced against the carriage
drivers of Montreal, and might therefore express
my convictions of their character and general
rapacity too strongly, so I will only trust myself
to say that they improved the occasion to the
utmost, and managed to extort such sums as must
have even surprised themselves if they were capable
of feeling any emotion beyond their inordinate love
of dollars. About £2 12s. sterling was the lowest
item they would hear of for taking a fare from the
Exhibition to the bridge, a distance of some two
and a half miles. There were numbers, however,
not only willing but anxious to pay this sum, so I
suppose it must be taken as the market value on
that occasion. All the route from the building
to the bridge was a mere quagmire, so that as the
carriages were open and every one drove fast, the
whole cortege—riders, drivers, and carriages
—presented one general average of muddy splashes
that was almost amusing, in spite of its annoyance.
Had it been a bad day, or had any contretemps oc-
curred in the proceedings of the morning, of course
the wrath of the wearers of bemired uniforms would
have been boundless; but, as it was, all officials,
although one or two looked overworked, were in
the best of temper, for the fetes of the morning had
been pre-eminently successful, and the weather,
which had been long threatening, was now clearing,
though slowly and apparently, with great reluc-
ance. _ _ _

The Victoria Bridge at Montreal, the opening of
which was now to be formally celebrated, is, be-
yond all doubt, the greatest engineering work in
the whole world. The Menai Bridge is a noble
structure, yet only the germ of the great idea here
developed to its fullest. Brunel's great bridge at
Saltash is remarkable for the wonderful skill with
which it overcomes obstacles which were, in fact,
almost created that the engineer might have
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Niagara—the most ingenious, and, perhaps even
the most beautiful bridge of its kind in the world,
is only designed for a special and peculiar gorge,
and, apart from this, no fair comparison can be
drawn between the Niagara and the Victoria, when
the former is only 800 feet long and the latter more
than 9,000. To appreciate the Victoria Bridge, to
do justice to its grand conception, and what seems
the almost superhuman energy and skill necessary
to carry out the idea in all its present grand perfec-
tion, one must see it. One must not only see it, for
a merely indefinite length gives no real idea of the
immensity of the undertaking. The visitor should
look at the St. Lawrence in winter when millions of
tons of floating ice come crushing down it, and in
summer when even at its lowest ebb the current
flows like a sluice, at the rate of eight miles an hour.
He should remember that the whole of its bed is a
mere quicksand, strewed over the bottom with gigan-
tic boulders, weighing 25 and 30 tons, that the depth
of water is nowhere less than 25 feet, and that the
stream at this point is two miles wide. When any
one takes the trouble to think quietly over the
nature of these obstacles, and then look up at the
lofty rib of iron, which stretches high in air from
shore to shore, he must be more or less than human
if he does not regard it as the grandest and most
successful engineering work which the Nvorld has
yet seen.
It is by no means an imposing or even tolerably
well-looking structure. Its heigth from the water
and its immense length gave it more the appear-
ance of a gigantic girder than a bridge. Viewed at
sunset, when its dnll tints are brightened into red,
and with Montreal as a background, with all its
tin roofs and steeples glistening like silver in the
sun, it looks well enough, though never much mere
than an iron footpath to the picturesque
city beyond ; and few can believe at the first
glance that it is really more than five
times longer and bigger than the longest
bridge ever yet constructed.
Its total length is very nearly two miles (9,500
feet) ; its height from the water little over 100 feet.
It is composed of 25 tubes joined in lengths of two
tubes, each about 270 feet, with a centre one of 330
at the highest part above the river. In weight of
iron it is very little over a ton per foot in length
(the lightest bridge of its kind ever made with the
same strength), and the contraction and expansion
of the whole make a difference in its length between
summer and winter of more than 10 feet, which is,
of course, properly allowed for in its construction.
The piers, which are 24 in number, and contain
some 3,000,000 cubic feet of masonry, were formed
by forcing down coffer dams of wood in the exact
places where the foundations were :to be laid, then
driving rows of piles round these, and filling in be-
tween the two with wads of clay, forced down till
they were watertight. The water inside the coffer
dam was then pumped out by steam pumps, and the
work of clearing out the gravel and mud, and laying
the masonry down on the very rock, commenced,
Quicksands let in the water to such an extent that
no pumps could keep the cofferdams empty, and
tiers upon tiers of piles had to be driven all round
them till the subterranean communication wa§ cut
off at last. At other times huge boulders were in
the way, and divers had to be employed for months
in the bed of the river securing chains to these rough
masses before they could be hooked up and taken
away. When all was clear and progressing well the
mere force of the current would sometimes destroy
the dams, and masses of floating ice in one short
winter's day laid waste the labour of a whole sum-
mer. It may give your readers some idea of the
varied and overwhelming nature of the obstacles
contended against when I state that some piers
were destroyed by ice and quicksands as often as
six or seven times year after year, and that on the
average of the whole 24 piers the work of each
one were actually destroyed thrice. Only the
genius of Stephenson and Ross, and only the
unconquerable nerve and readiness of Mr. Hodges,
to whom the entire work of the building was in-
trusted, could have overcome such obstacles, and
persevered in the face of such apparently
hopeless reverses. At last the piers got above
water, and were faced towards the set of the cur-
ent with.a long massive wedge of granite masonry,
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working in the summer, they were built to the
required height, and then the labour of construct-
ing the tubes commenced. The dangerous rapi-
dity of the stream made it impossible that the
tubes could be built on shore, floated out on rafts,
and then raised to their positions in one piece,
as was the case with the bridge at Menai. So the
whole tube was first actually built in England, and
sent out piecemeal, with every plate bar and angle
iron numbered with such minute exactness that, as
far as putting together was concerned, there was
no more difficulty than with a child's toy. Thus,
with the assistance of a temporary scaffolding
stretched between the piers, tube after tube was
slowly built across to the centre, where the great
span of 350 feet comes. As may be imagined, the work
of building this across with no supports from below
presented a series of engineering difficulties such as
have never yet been encountered in any piece of
ironwork that was ever put together.. Mr. Hodges,