A sturdy English oak furnished the model for the first of the great modern lighthouses. A little more than one hundred and forty years ago John Smeaton, maker of odd and intricate philosophical instruments and dabbler in mechanical engineering, was called upon to place a light upon the bold and dangerous reefs of Eddystone, near Plymouth, England. John Smeaton never had built a lighthouse; but he was a man of great ingenuity and courage, and he knew the kind of lighthouse _not_ to build; for twice before the rocks of Eddystone had been marked, and twice the mighty waves of the Atlantic had bowled over the work of the builders as easily as they would have overturned a skiff. Winstanley, he of song and story, designed the first of these structures, and he and all his keepers lost their lives when the light went down; the other, the work of John Rudyerd, was burned to the water's edge, and one of the keepers, strangely enough, died from the effects of melting lead which fell from the roof and entered his open mouth as he gazed upward. Both of these lighthouses were of wood, and both were ornamented with balconies and bay-windows, which furnished ready holds for the rough handling of the wind. [Illustration: Robert Stevenson, Builder of the Famous Bell Rock Lighthouse, and Author of Important Inventions and Improvements in the System of Sea Lighting. _From a bust by Joseph, now in the library of Bell Rock Lighthouse._] [Illustration: The Bell Rock Lighthouse, on the Eastern Coast of Scotland. _From the painting by Turner. The Bell Rock Lighthouse was built by Robert Stevenson, grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson, on the Inchcape Reef, in the North Sea, near Dundee, Scotland, in 1807-1810._] John Smeaton walked in the woods and thought of all these problems. He tells quaintly in his memoirs how he observed the strength with which an oak-tree bore its great weight of leaves and branches; and when he built his lighthouse, it was wide and flaring at the base, like the oak, and deeply rooted into the sea-rock with wedges of wood and iron. The waist was tapering and cylindrical, bearing the weight of the keeper's quarters and the lantern as firmly and jauntily as the oak bears its branches. Moreover, he built of stone, to avoid the possibility of fire, and he dovetailed each stone into its neighbour, so that the whole tower would face the wind and the waves as if it were one solid mass of granite. For years Smeaton's Eddystone blinked a friendly warning to English mariners, serving its purpose perfectly, until the Brothers of Trinity saw fit to build a larger tower in its place. In England the famous lighthouses of Bell Rock, built by Robert Stevenson, Skerryvore, and Wolf Rock are all stone towers; and in our own country, Minot's Ledge, off Boston Harbour, more difficult of construction than any of them, Spectacle Reef light in Lake Huron, and Stannard Rock light in Lake Superior are good examples of Smeaton's method of building.