type was supported by means of a series of equidistant vertical rods, and was lacking stiffness, but this was remedied by trussing the road bed, using inclined stays extending from the towers and partially supporting the roadway for some distance out from the tower. The next finest suspension bridge was constructed by Thomas Telford and finished in 1826, across the Menai Strait to connect the island of Anglesea with the mainland of Wales. Telford was born in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, in 1757, and died in Westminster in 1834. Beginning life as a stone mason, he rose by his own industry to be a master among architects and a prince among builders of iron bridges, aqueducts, canals, tunnels, harbours and docks. The Menai bridge was composed of chains or wire ropes, each nearly a third of a mile in length, and which descended 60 feet into sloping pits or drifts, where they were screwed to cast-iron frames embedded in the rocks. The span of the suspended central arch was 560 feet, and the platform was 100 feet above high water. Seven stone arches of 52½ feet span make up the rest of the bridge. But a suspension bridge was completed in 1834 by M. Challey of Lyon over the Saane at Fribourg, Switzerland, which greatly surpassed the Menai bridge. The span is 880 feet from pier to pier, and the roadway is 167 feet above the river. It is supported by four iron wire cables, each consisting of 1056 wires. It was tested by placing 15 pieces of artillery, drawn by 50 horses and accompanied by 300 men crowded together as closely as possible, first at the centre, and then at each extreme, causing a depression of 39½ inches, but no sensible oscillation was experienced. Isambard K. Brunel was another great engineer, who constructed a suspension bridge at the Isle of Bourbon in 1823, and the Charing Cross over the Thames at Hungerford in 1845, which was a footbridge, having a span of 675 feet, the longest span of any bridge in England. Then followed finer and larger suspension bridges in other parts of the world. It was across the Niagara in front of the great falls that in 1855 British America and the United States were joined by a magnificent suspension bridge, one of the finest in the world, and the two English speaking countries were then physically and commercially united. At the opening of the bridge, one portion of which was for a railway, the shriek of the locomotive and the roar of the train mingled with the roar of the wild torrent 250 feet below. The bridge, 800 feet long, is a single span, supported by four enormous cables of wire stretching from the Canadian cliff to the opposite United States cliff. The cables pass over the tops of lofty stone towers arising from these cliffs, and each cable consists of no less than 4,000 distinct wires. The roadway hangs from these cables, suspended by 624 vertical rods.