No public calamity has much effect on the modern mind. Tay Bridges and Titanics are like strong acts in a tragic play, whose influence we forget very soon. It is a thousand pities, for the next war may teach us, by frequent disasters, that machine-worship has been a mad gambler everywhere. Bridges suffered much from the priggishness of the Renaissance, but they have suffered infinitely more from the obsessions that ruined Sir Thomas Bouch. Poor Bouch! Not only did he wish to astonish the world by constructing an unparalleled bridge, wonderfully long, curved at both ends, and with a varying gradient. He desired also to prove to his employers that he could be a pattern of unusual economy. Worse still, he was so wrapped up in his calculations that he looked upon Nature with little respect. In other words, he tried to achieve “a great feat of engineering”--not often a fortunate enterprise. From the founding of his piers he ought to have learnt that his work would be endangered partly by the repercussion of railway traffic, and partly by the varied way in which the piers would feel the scour of tidal waters during bad weather. Fourteen piers on the southern side were built on rock, then for six piers the bed was a layer of hard material resting on silt, and from the twenty-second pier northward there was sand, with occasional beds of gravel mixed with boulders. Here was a site to inspire as much awed patience and care as the Bridge Friars gave untiringly to the Pont Saint-Esprit over the Rhône. Yet in Mr. Stewart’s description there is but one emotion--a quiet self-confidence, as if the forces of Nature were as easy to manage as well-trained poodle dogs. II