sent time it has received no essential improvements. Having taught its use to his brother and the rest of his relations, he estab lished his frame at Culverton, near Nottingham, as a formidable competitor of female handiwork, teaching his mistress, by the insignificance to which he reduced the implements of her pride, that the love of a man of genius was not to be slighted with impunity. After practising this business for five years, he became aware of its importance in a national point of view, and brought his inven tion to London, to seek protection and encouragement from the court, by whom his fabrics were much admired. The period of his visit was not propitious. Elizabeth, the patroness of whatever ministered to her vanity as a woman, and her state as a princess, was in the last stage of her decline. Her successor was too deeply engrossed with political intrigues for securing the stability of his throne, to be able to afford any leisure to cherish an infant manufacture. Nay, though Lee and his brother made a pair of stock. ings in the presence of the king, it is said he viewed their frame rather as a dangerous innovation, likely to deprive the poor of labor and bread, rather than as a means of multiplying the resources of national industry and giving employment to many thousand people.

The encouragement which the narrow-minded James refused was offered by the French king Henry IV., and his sagacious minister Sully. They invited Lee to come to France with his admirable machines. Thither he accordingly repaired, and settled at Rouen, and gave an impulse to manufactures, which is even felt to the present day in that department. After Henry had fallen a victim to domestic treachery, Lee, envied by the natives whose genius he had eclipsed, was proscribed as a protestant, and obliged to seek concealment from the bloody bigots in Paris, where he ended his days in secret grief and disappointment. Some of his workmen made their escape into England, where, under his ingenious apprentice Aston, they mounted the stocking frame, and thus restored to its native country an invention which had well nigh been lost to it.

Ancient and Modern Labor.

The great Pyramid of Egypt cost the labor of one hundred thousand inen for twenty years, exclusive of those who prepared and collected the materials. The steam engines of England, alone, worked by thirty-six thousand men, would raise the same quantity of materials to the same height in eighteen hours, which reckoning ten hours to the day, and three hundred working days to the year, would enable the moderns to erect over 3,000 pyramids in the same time

The Slide of Alpnach.

Amongst the forests which flank many of the lofty mountains of Switzerland, some of the finest timber is found in positions almost inaccessible. The expense of roads, even if it were possible to make them in such situations, would prevent the inhabitants from deriving any advantages from these almost inexhaustible supplies. Placed by nature at a considerable elevation above the spot on which they are required, they are precisely in fit circumstances for the application of machinery; and the inhabitants constantly avail themselves of it, to enable the force of gravity to relieve them from some portion of their labor. The inclined planes which they have established in various forests, by which the timber has been sent down to the water-courses, must have excited the admiration of every traveller; and these slides, in addition to the merit of simplicity, have that of economy, as their construction requires scarcely any thing beyond the material which grows upon the spot Of all these specimens of carpentry, the Slide of Alpnach was by far the most considerable, both from its great length, and from the almost inaccessible position from which it descended. The fol lowing is the description of that work given in Gilbert's Annalen, 1819, and translated in the second volume of Brewster's Journal:

These

For many centuries, the rugged flanks and the deep gorges of Mount Pilatus were covered with impenetrable forests. Lofty precipices encircled them on all sides. Even the daring hunters were scarcely able to reach them; and the inhabitants of the valley had never conceived the idea of disturbing them with the axe. immense forests were therefore permitted to grow and to perish, without being of the least utility to man, till a foreigner, conducted into their wild recesses in the pursuit of the chamois, was struck with wonder at the sight, and directed the attention of several Swiss gentlemen to the extent and superiority of the timber. The most intelligent and skilful individuals, however, considered it quite impracticable to avail themselves of such inaccessible stores. It was not till November, 1816, that M. Rupp, and three Swiss gentlemen, entertaining more sanguine hopes, drew up a plan of a slide, found. ed on trigonometrical measurements. Having purchased a certain extent of the forests from the commune of Alpnach for six thousand crowns, they began the construction of the slide, and comple ted it in the spring of 1818.

The Slide of Alpnach is formed entirely of about 25,000 large pine trees, deprived of their bark, and united together in a very ingenious manner, without the aid of iron. It occupied about one

hundred and sixty workmen during eighteen months, and cost nearly one hundred thousand francs, or £4250. It is about three leagues, or forty-four thousand English feet long, and terminates in the Lake of Lucerne. It has the form of a trough, about six feet broad, and from three to six feet deep. Its bottom is formed of three trees, the middle one of which has a groove cut out in the direction of its length, for receiving small rills of water, which are conducted into it from various places, for the purpose of diminish. ing the friction. The whole of the slide is sustained by about two thousand supports; and in many places it is attached, in a very ingenious manner, to the rugged precipices of granite.

The direction of the slide is sometimes straight, and sometimes zig-zag, with an inclination of from 10° to 18°. It is often car. ted along the sides of hills, and the flanks of precipitous rocks, and sometimes passes over their summits. Occasionally it goes under ground, and at other times it is conducted over the deep gor. ges by scaffoldings one hundred and twenty feet in height.

The boldness which characterizes this work, the sagacity dis played in all its arrangements, and the skill of the engineer, have excited the wonder of all who have seen it. Before any step could be taken in its erection, it was necessary to cut several thousand trees, to obtain a passage through the impenetrable thickets; and, as the workmen advanced, men were posted at certain distances, in order to point out the road for their return, and to discover, in the gorges, the places where the piles of wood had been estab lished. M. Rupp was himself obliged, more than once, to be sus. pended by cords, in order to descend precipices many hundred feet high; and, in the first months of the undertaking, he was attacked with a violent fever, which deprived him of the power of superintending his workmen. Nothing, however, could diminish his invincible perseverance. He was carried every day to the mountain in a barrow, to direct the labors of the workmen, which was absolutely necessary, as he had scarcely two good carpenters among them all; the rest having been hired by accident, without any of the knowledge which such an undertaking required. M. Rupp had also to contend against the prejudices of the peasantry. He was supposed to have communion with the devil. He was charged with heresy, and every obstacle was thrown in the way of an enterprise which they regarded as absurd and impracticable.

All these difficulties, however, were surmounted, and he had at ast the satisfaction of observing the trees descend from the mountain with the rapidity of lightning. The larger pines, which were about a hundred feet long, and ten inches thick at their smaller ex. tremity, ran through the space of three leagues, or nearly nine miles

in two minutes and a half, and during their descent, they appeared to be only a few feet in length. The arrangements for this part of the operation were extremely simple. From the lower end of the slide to the upper end, where the trees were introduced, work. men were posted at regular distances, and as soon as every thing was ready, the workman at the lower end of the slide cried out to the one above him,' Lachez,' (let go.) The cry was repeated from one to another, and reached the top of the slide in three minutes. The workman at the top of the slide then cried out to the one below him, 'Il vient,' (it comes,) and the tree was instantly launched down the slide, preceded by the cry which was repeated from post to post. As soon as the tree had reached the bottom, and plunged into the lake, the cry of Lachez was repeated as before, and a new tree was launched in a similar manner. By these means a tree descended every five or six minutes, provided no accident happened to the slide, which sometimes took place, but which was instantly repaired when it did.

In order to show the enormous force which the trees acquired from the great velocity of their descent, M. Rupp made arrangements for causing some of the trees to spring from the slide. They penetrated by their thickest extremities no less than from eighteen to twenty-four feet into the earth; and one of the trees having by accident struck against the other, it instantly cleft it through its whole length, as if it had been struck by lightning.

After the trees had descended the slide, they were collected into rafts upon the lake, and conducted to Lucerne. From thence they descended the Reuss, then the Aar to near Brugg, afterwards to Waldshut by the Rhine, then to Basle, and even to the sea when it was necessary.

In order that none of the small wood might be lost, M. Rupp established in the forest large manufactories of charcoal. He erected magazines for preserving it when manufactured, and had made arrangements for the construction of barrels, for the purpose of carrying it to the market. In winter, when the slide was covered with snow, the barrels were made to descend on a kind of sledge. The wood which was not fit for being carbonized, was heaped up and burnt, and the ashes packed up and carried away, during the winter.

A few days before the author of the preceding account visited the slide, an inspector of the navy had come for the purpose of ex. amining the quality of the timber. He declared that he had never seen any timber that was so strong, so fine, and of such a size; and he concluded an advantageous bargain for one thousand trees. Such is a brief account of a work undertaken and executed by

a single individual, and which has excited a very high degree of interest in every part of Europe. We regret to add, that this mag nificent structure no longer exists, and that scarcely a trace of it is to be seen upon the flanks of Mount Pilatus. Political circumstances having taken away the principal source of the demand for timber, and no other market having been found, the operation of cutting and transporting the trees necessarily ceased.

Professor Playfair, who visited this singular slide, states, that six minutes was the usual time occupied in the descent of a tree, but that in wet weather it reached the lake in three minutes.

American Road-making.

Road-making* is a branch of engineering which has been very little cultivated in America; and it was not until the introduction of railways that the Americans entertained the idea of transporting heavy goods by any other means than those afforded by canals and slackwater navigation. Their objection to paved or Macadamized roads such as are used in Europe, is founded on the prejudicial effects exerted upon works of that description by the severe and protracted winters by which the country is visited, and also the difficulty and expense of obtaining materials suitable for their construction, and for keeping them in a state of proper repair. Stone fitted for the purposes of road-making is by no means plentiful in America; and as the number of workmen is small in proportion to the quantity of work which is generally going forward in the country, manual labor is very expensive. Under these circumstances, it is evident that roads would have been a very costly means of communication, and as they are no suitable for the transport of heavy goods, the Americans, in com mencing their internal improvements, directed their whole atten tion to the construction of canals, as being much better adapted to supply their wants.

"The roads throughout the United States and Canada are, from these causes, not very numerous, and most of those by which I travelled were in so neglected and wretched a condition as hardly to deserve the name of highways, being quite unfit for any vehicle but an American stage, and any pilot but an American driver. In many parts of the country, the operation of cutting a track through the forests of a sufficient width to allow vehicles to pass each other, is all that has been done towards the formation of a road. The

* Stevenson's Engineering in North America