The Brooklyn Bridge is thus one of the mechanical wonders of the world, one of the greatest and most characteristic of the monuments of the nineteenth century. Its towers, at least, bid fair to outlast every structure of which they command a view. Everybody recalls Macaulay’s prophecy of the time “when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand upon a broken arch of London Bridge, to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.” But when our New-Zealander takes his stand above the saddles that are now ridden by the cables of the bridge, to look over the site of a forsaken city, there will be no ruins of churches--at least, of churches now in being--for him to sketch or see. The web of woven steel that now hangs between the stark masses of the towers may have disappeared, its slender filaments rusted into nothingness under the slow corrosion of the centuries. Its builders and the generation for which they wrought may have been as long forgotten as are now the builders of the Pyramids, whereof the traveller, “as he paceth amazedly those deserts,” asks the Historic Muse “who builded them; and she mumbleth something, but what it is he heareth not.” It is not unimaginable that our future archæologist, looking from one of these towers upon the solitude of a mastless river and a dispeopled land, may have no other means of reconstructing our civilization than that which is furnished him by the tower on which he stands. What will his judgment of us be? This, or something like this, ought to be a question with every man who builds a structure which is meant to outlast him, whether it be a temple of religion or a work of bare utility like this. It so happens that the work which is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge. This is in itself characteristic of our time. It is true of no other people since the Romans, and of none before. Like the Roman remains, the duration of this work of ours will show that we knew how to build. “A Roman work,” we often hear it said of the bridge, and it is in many ways true. It is far beyond any Roman monument in refinement of mechanical skill. It is Roman in its massiveness and durability. It is Roman, too, in its disregard of art, in resting satisfied with the practical solution of the great problem of its builders, without a sign of that skill which would have explained and emphasized the process of construction at every step, and everywhere, in whole and in part, made the structure tell of the work it was doing. There have been periods in history when this æsthetic purpose would have seemed to the builder of such a monument as much a matter of course, as necessary a part of his work, as the practical purpose which animated the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge. It would have seemed so to the engineer of a bridge in Athens in the second