Messrs Fowler and Baker were the engineers of the Forth railway bridge. It was begun in 1883 and finished in 1890. It is built nearly all of steel, and is one of the most stupendous works of the kind. It crosses two channels formed by the island of Inchgarvie, and each of the channel spans is 1710 feet in the clear and a clear headway of 150 feet under the bridge. Three balanced cantilevers are employed, poised on four gigantic steel tube legs supported on four huge masonry piers. The height of the bridge above the piers is 330 feet. The cantilever portion has the appearance of a vast elongated diamond. Steel lattice work of girders, forms the upper side of the cantilever, while the under side consists of a hollow curve approaching in form a quadrant of a circle drawn from the base of the legs or struts to the ends of the cantilever. Such is the growth of these great bridges with their tremendous spans across which man is spinning his iron webs, that when seen at night with a fiery engine pulling its thundering train across in the darkness, one is reminded of Milton’s description, “over the dark abyss whose boiling gulf tamely endured a bridge of wondrous length, from Hell continued, reaching the utmost orb of this frail world.” The _lighthouses_ of the century, in masonry, do not greatly excel in general principles those of preceding ones, as at Eddystone, designed by Smeaton. Nicholas Douglass, however, invented a new system of dovetailing, and great improvements have been made in the system of illuminating. Lighthouses are also distinguished from those of preceding centuries by the substitution of iron and cast steel for masonry. The first cast-iron lighthouse was put up at Point Morant, Jamaica, in 1842. Since then they have taken the form of iron skeleton towers. One of the latest and most picturesque of lighthouses is that of Bartholdi’s statue of Liberty enlightening the world, the gift of the French government to the United States, framed by M. Eiffel, the great French engineer, and set up by the United States at Bedloe’s Island in New York harbor. It consists of copper plates on a network of iron. Although the statue is larger than any in the world of such composite construction, its success as a lighthouse is not as notable as many farther seaward. In _excavating_, _dredging_ and _draining_, the inventions of the century have been very numerous, but, like numerous advances in the arts, such inventions, so far as great works are concerned, have developed from and are closely related to steam engineering. The making of roads, railroads, canals and tunnels has called forth thousands of ingenious mechanisms for their accomplishment. A half dozen men with a steam-power excavator or dredger can in one day perform a greater extent of work than could a thousand men and a thousand horses in a single day a few generations ago.