Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/494

476 of a century than of a decade to get the storage battery in shape for transatlantic working.

But the railways would all be run by it, and arc and incandescent lamps would shine on the country roads and in rural hamlets all along the distributing lines in the kingdom. The reign of electricity would have set in, for Great Britain at least, in a sense not realized at all as yet, though we speak of the present as the age of electricity; and the deadly smoke from London, Manchester, and Liverpool chimneys would cease, with its accompanying black and yellow fogs and consequent stagnation of business and various kinds of illness. St. Paul's could be cleaned up once for all and shine forth in its whiteness for generations, instead of becoming again the grimy and disreputable-looking object that the soot from London's bituminous coal has made it.

It is hardly to be expected that the great work referred to will actually be begun just yet, although it would be little more than an even thing between the cost of this fifteen-mile dam and Manchester's thirty-five-mile ship canal, but it is one of the great projects that the near future is likely to have in store, and all the results I have foreshadowed are logical outcomes of it. The length of time that the construction of such a work would require has been estimated at in the vicinity of three years, if properly pushed, and the cost would probably be something over one hundred million dollars.

Considering the thing from the broad standpoint of the change in the whole geography of the British Isles which would follow the construction of the isthmus, several most interesting and extremely important questions arise. As to whether these have been all carefully investigated by the projectors of the proposed enterprise I am not aware. In the first place, what would become of the water which at present finds a vent through the Irish Channel in case this channel were stopped? It would presumably go by the west coast of Ireland and a small part, perhaps, up round by the north and east of Scotland; and the question is, would this have a salutary effect upon the west Irish coast, and would it withdraw a part of the Gulf Stream's benign influence from England and the east coast of Ireland? The result of the work might possibly show it to have been unwise to tamper with the natural course of a main branch of that ocean current which is known to have such an excellent influence on the climate and temperature of the British Isles, which, as everybody knows, are as far north as Labrador. The possibility reminds one of the story of the Anglophobiac American who proposed cutting a canal through Yucatan, or some such locality, in order that the Gulf Stream might be nipped in the bud, so to speak, and never reach England