Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/91

Popular Science Monthly would have to be done, they would simply be laid on supports, and great subsequent expense would be saved.

As a result of this construction it would not be much harder to get to Brooklyn than to cross Broadway. Indeed, New York and Brooklyn would be as much one big city as are the East Side and the West Side. New York would expand logically. At present most of the expansion is to the north of the city, and forms its chief problem.

This practically completes my scheme. I do not urge the simultaneous attack of the entire project. It should be carried through section by section, and this would involve an annual expenditure of from fifty to one hundred million dollars.

When these facts are understood there will be no difficulty in obtaining the necessary authority to start work. Then, after the section between the Battery and Staten Island has been laid out on paper, enough land can be sold to start the work, which would proceed just as fast as the proceeds of the sale justified, and a really great debt-free New York would result.



N mountain slopes so steep as to appear quite worthless for agriculture, the rice growers of the Philippine Islands are producing crops upon made-to-order farms. These famous terraces of the Mountain Province extend as far as the eye can reach, a work of patience rivalling the pyramids. Imagine a whole mountain laid out in ledge above ledge, the walls almost perpendicular, the strip of field graded just enough to allow the water to flow from one terrace to another without violence, so that every acre is irrigated but not washed out by the current.

As the photograph indicates, the work appears too vast to be the work of human beings. In fact it might better represent some great upheaval of the earth's crust.

XPERIMENTS are being carried on in Cuba with the fiber of a plant locally known as malva blanca, which is said to produce an ideal fabric for sugar bags.