by a masculine or neutral title.  In the year 1769, Mark Isambard Brunel, the Edison of his age, as his son was the Ericsson of that following, permitted himself to be born at Hacqueville; near Rouen, France, went to school, to sea, and into politics; compromised himself in the latter profession, and went to America in 1794, where he surveyed the canal now connecting Lake Champlain with the Hudson River at Albany, N.Y.  There he turned architect, then returned to Europe, settled, married, and was knighted in England.  He occupied eighteen years of his life in building an unproductive tunnel beneath the river Thames at London; invented a method of shuffling cards without using the hands, and several of her devices for dispensing with labor, which, upon completion, were abandoned from economical motives.  On his decease, his son and heir, I.K.  Brunel, whose practical experience in the Thames Tunnel job, where his biographers assert he had occasion more than once to save his life by swimming, qualified him to tread in his father’s shoes, took up his trade.  Brunel, Jr., having demonstrated by costly experiments, to the successful proof, but thorough exasperation, of his moneyed backers, that his father’s theory for employing carbonic acid gas as a motive power was practicable enough, but too expensive for anything but the dissipation of a millionaire’s income, settled down to the profession of engineering science, in which he did as well as his advantages of education enabled him.  Like all men in advance of their time, when he considered himself the victim of arbitrary capitalists ignoring the bent of his genius, he did his best work in accordance with their stipulations.  He designed the Great Western, the first steamship (paddle-wheel) ever built to cross the Atlantic; and the Great Britain, the original ocean screw steamer.  Flushed with these successes, Brunel procured pecuniary support from speculative fools, who, dazzled by the glittering statistical array that can be adduced in support of any chimerical venture, the inventor’s repute, and their unbaked experience, imagined that the alluring Orient was ready to yield, like over-ripe fruit, to their shadowy grasp; and tainted as he evidently was with hereditary mania, Brunel resolved to seize the illusionary immortality that he fondly imagined to be within his reach.

There was not much the matter with the brain of Brunel, Jr., but that little was enough; a competent railroad surveyor, a good bridge builder, he needed to be held within bounds when handling other people’s funds; for the man’s ambition would have lead him to undertake to bridge the Atlantic.  He met with the speculators required in this very instance of the constructors of the Great Eastern.  This monstrous ship has been described so often, that it would be a cruelty to our readers to inflict the story upon them again.