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The machine once presented to the rock, projects into it simultaneously four horizontalseries of sixteen scalpels, working backward and forward, by means of springs cased in,and put in operation by the same water power. While these are at work, one verticalseries on each side works simultaneously up and down, so that together they cut out fourblocks on all sides, except in the rock behind, from which they are afterwards detachedby hand. During the operation a pump throws a jet of water between each pair ofscalpels, to prevent the heating of the tools, and to wash out the rubbish. After theircomplete separation, the blocks arc pulled out by the help of the endless cable, andreceived into a waggon, to bo drawn from the tunnel. The machines arc only to cut agallery thirteen feet wide and seven high, which is afterwards to be enlarged by theordinary means to the size mentioned above. It has already been ascertained that eachof the two machines, at opposite ends of the tunnel, will excavate to the extent oftwenty-two feet a day, and it is thus estimated that the whole excavation will be com-pleted in four years. The rocks which it is supposed will be mot with are gypsum,limestone, and quartz in veins. Of the effects of such an undertaking, there can be butone opinion. It would form a new highway for the diffusion of moral and political

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SUXD1U.no, ox T1IE ROAD FROM IYREA TO VERCEIL

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blessings all over the continent. The very fact that the idea originated in Sardinia , is astriking instance of the good that is wrought by a free government, and presents abrilliant contrast to the gloomy rule of the papacy, which totally prohibits the formationof railways in the States of the Church. We have fears for the early completion of thisproject, but our best wishes arise for its success.

And now let the traveller, before he proceeds on his way, pause, and take his lastglimpse of the Alps—those mighty masses which, during successive weeks, have beengazed on again and again, formed the subject of our hourly conversation, enkindledemotions which no words can express, and even haunted in forms of beauty andsublimity our nightly dreams. Ye monarchs of olden Europe , though reluctance risesstrongly within us, we must bid you farewell! Farewell to your snow-capped domes,your sky -piercing aiguilles, your lightning-riven crags, your smiling valleys, yourspacious ice-fields, your awful ravines, your mantling clouds. Immense, indeed, are theages that have elapsed from the first period when ye emerged, probably as an archipelagoof low islands, in a tropical climate, to that epoch when the plants and animals whichlived upon you indicated a Mediterranean temperature, and then to that Arctic time