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HAT most wonderfully useful of all the servants of men, water, which seems to have been discovered, as such, only in very modern times, and which is now accomplishing marvels undreamed of a decade or two ago, has just been set a new task in little Switzerland, at which the scientific world is again opening its eyes in astonishment. A tube-or rather two tubes-full of water, are to be made to lift and lower boats, burdened with an international commerce, over the most formidable mountain range of Europe, the Alps. Actually, the liquid element is to pick

up the loaded craft in Italy and to deposit them in Germany by its own natural power, without the use of propelling machinery. Balancing the waters of the mountain lakes against each other, Italian engineers propose to create a new road for commerce, which will become almost literally an artery of world traffic, with an ebb and flow that will draw and push the currents of trade back and forth, like the beat of a great heart feeding the veins of two nations.

Crossing the Alps by road and by car, even by balloon, has been accomplished successfully, but transportation of freight over the huge natural barrier between the halves of a continent has been a problem still to be solved in a commercially

satisfactory manner. Schemes varied and
extensive have been carried out, some of
them conspicuously useful, but none of
them will stand comparison, either as
engineering exploits or as promising
financial ventures with the
present one. The project,
planned by Pietro Cami-
nada, Italian engineer, is
entirely novel, and is sim-
ple and ingenious to the
same degree which has
characterized practically
every great invention. By
it, an all-water way across
the mountain range, seem-
ingly an impossibility, is to
become a reality, to link
the Mediterranean with the
Baltic and the North Sea.

The cost will be huge, of course. The engineer who has planned the scheme. states that eighty millions of dollars will be required for the first section laid out, from Milan to Lake Constance, and from these termini, the route extends in both directions, across the southern mountain range to Genoa and north or rather west to Basel on the Rhine. But the value of such a waterway to the markets of northern and western Europe, will be so enormous that the whole eastern world is concerned.

On the map, printed herewith, the course of the proposed canal is marked by a heavy black line. Crooked enough it looks, yet it is laid out on the good old geometric principle that a straight line is the shortest distance between two

Two VIEWS OF A STANDARD BOAT.

Apennines, at nearly twelve hundred feet above the sea level, in two galleries nearly two miles long, the Splugen is to be crossed at a height of over four thousand feet, with tunnels nine miles long. The route is laid out with strictest economy of distance and comparatively little regard for the height to which the boats must climb. In fact the height of the water supply is practically the only limit, from an engineering point of view, for the ascent.

of

The waterway, eighty miles in length, connecting Genoa with Milan alone, would be of the highest economical importance both to Italy and to Switzerland. It will connect the whole range the river Po, and accordingly the Lake of Como, directly with the Gulf of Genoa. Thus the Lake of Como will constitute practically a northern extension of that Gulf. From Milan to the city of Chiavenna, the route is planned by the daring Italian, and thence up through the valley as far as Isolato, to the southern entrance of the Alpine tunnel, at an altitude of almost four thousand feet. The northern outlet of the tunnel is then reached in the ravine of Rofna, below the Splugen, at practically the same height, after which the