He had more perilous escapes from violent death than fall to the lot of most men. He had two narrow escapes from drowning by the river suddenly bursting in upon the Thames-Tunnel works. During the Great Western Railway inspection, he was one day riding a pony rapidly down Boxhill, when the animal stumbled and fell, pitching the engineer on his head; he was taken up for dead, but eventually recovered. One day, when driving an engine through the Box-tunnel, he discerned some light object standing on the same line of road along which his engine was travelling; he turned on the full steam and dashed the object (a contractor’s truck) into a thousand pieces. When on board the _Great Western_ steam-ship, he fell down a hatchway into the hold, and was nearly killed. But the most extraordinary accident which befel him was, in showing a sleight-of-hand trick to his children, his swallowing a half-sovereign, which dropped into his windpipe, remained there for six weeks, when it was removed through an incision in the windpipe, by Sir Benjamin Brodie and Mr. Key; his body was inverted, and after a few coughs, the coin dropped into his mouth. Mr. Brunel used afterwards to say, that the moment when he heard the gold piece strike against his upper front teeth was perhaps the most exquisite in his whole life.—Abridged from the _Quarterly Review_, No. 223. Footnote 101: _Saturday Review._ Footnote 102: This district was originally a clayey swamp; but Mr. Cubitt finding the strata to consist of gravel and clay of inconsiderable depth, the clay he removed and burned into bricks; and by building upon the substratum of gravel, he converted this spot from one of the most unhealthy to one of the most healthy—a singular adaptation of the means to the end. ---------------------------- SCIENTIFIC FARMING. Southey, in _The Doctor_, remarks: “It is a fact not unworthy of notice, that the most intelligent farmers in the neighbourhood of London are persons who have taken to farming as a business, because of their strong inclination for rural employments: one of the very best in Middlesex, when the Survey of that county was published by the Board of Agriculture, had been a tailor.”