Men flash their messages across mighty continents and beneath the bosom of the wide Atlantic; they weigh the distant planets, and analyse sun and stars; they span Niagara with a railway bridge, and pierce the Alps with a railway tunnel: yet the poet of the age in which all these things are done or doing sings, ‘We men are a puny race.’ And certainly, the great works which belong to man as a race can no more be held to evidence the importance of the individual man than the vast coral reefs and atolls of the Pacific can be held to evidence the working power of the individual coral polype. But if man, standing alone, is weak, man working according to the law assigned to his race from the beginning—that is, in fellowship with his kind—is verily a being of power. Perhaps no work ever undertaken by man strikes one as more daring than the attempt to pierce the Alps with a tunnel. Nature seems to have upreared these mighty barriers as if with the design of showing man how weak he is in her presence. Even the armies of Hannibal and Napoleon seemed all but powerless in the face of these vast natural fastnesses. Compelled to creep slowly and cautiously along the difficult and narrow ways which alone were open to them, decimated by the chilling blasts which swept the face of the rugged mountain-range, and dreading at every moment the pitiless swoop of the avalanche, the French and Carthaginian troops exhibited little of the pomp and dignity which we are apt to associate with the operations of warlike armies. Had the denizen of some other planet been able to watch their progress, he might indeed have said ‘these men are a puny race.’ In _this_ only, that _they succeeded_, did the troops of Hannibal and Napoleon assert the dignity of the human race. Grand as was the aspect of nature, and mean as was that of man during the progress of the contest, it was nature that was conquered, man that overcame. And now man has entered on a new conflict with nature in the gloomy fastnesses of the Alps. The barrier which he had scaled of old he has now undertaken to pierce. And the wwww—bold and daring as it seemed—is three parts finished. (See date of article.)