The Britannia Bridge was a great triumph for Robert Stephenson. He appears first to have seized the idea, and, assisted no doubt by Fairbairn’s experiments and by able coadjutors, he carried it through to a successful completion. He was of course the son of George Stephenson, who had done so much for the locomotive, and according to Smiles, “he almost worshipped his father’s memory, and was ever ready to attribute to him the chief merit of his own achievements as an engineer.” “It was his thorough training,” Mr. Smiles once heard him remark, “his example, and his character, which made me the man I am.” Further, in an address as President of the Institution of Civil Engineers, in January, 1856, he said: “All I know, and all I have done is primarily due to the parent whose memory I cherish and revere.” That father had died before the Britannia Bridge was completed, though he had been present at the floating of the first tube at Conway. The great engineer passed away on the 12th of August, 1848, at the age of sixty-seven, and his distinguished son Robert, who had no children, only survived him by eleven years. But before he died he had designed, and Mr. A. M. Ross, who had assisted at the Conway Bridge, had assisted in carrying out the celebrated Victoria Tubular Bridge over the great St. Lawrence River at Montreal. This bridge was for the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada, and for immense length and vastness of proportions, combined with magnificent strength, is one of the wonders of the world. It is five times as long as the Britannia Bridge, being not far short of two miles. It has a big central span of 330 feet, and twenty-four spans of 242 feet. The iron tubes are suspended sixty feet above the water beneath. [Illustration: VICTORIA TUBULAR BRIDGE, MONTREAL.] One great difficulty in the problem was the ice. Immense quantities come down in the spring, and to resist this enormous pressure the piers are most massive, containing thousands of tons each of solid masonry. These piers are based on the solid rock, the two central towers being eighteen feet in width and the others fifteen feet. To protect them from the ice, huge guards made of stone blocks clamped with rivets built up in the form of an incline were placed before the piers on the up-stream side. The bridge was begun in July, 1854, and occupied four and a-half years in construction, it being completed in December, 1859, about two months after its designer had died. Gigantic though this structure is, and great as is the honour which it reflects on Robert Stephenson and the resident and joint engineer Mr. Ross, yet with the exception of the remarkable and massive ice-guards to the piers, it does not differ materially from the Britannia and Conway Tubular Bridges. These were the first famous examples of the new principle.