Page:The fairy tales of science.djvu/371

 street, or St. James's-street, the hull would not sink to the roadway, as its sides would rest on the opposite parapets. Even Regent-street would not receive it without the paddle-boxes; and with those appendages, the broadest street in London, Portland-place, would barely afford it room. The paddle-wheels alone are higher than any but the highest houses. If stretched over Russell-square, one end would rest on the house-tops of the north side, and the other on those of the south.

Everything relating to the Leviathan has a magnitude proportional to that of the vast hull; thus Alexis Soyer, the celebrated chef de cuisine, made a calculation that one hundred persons could dine in one of its funnels, and actually proposed that a banquet should be spread for five hundred guests in the five chimneys before they were fitted to the ship.

Let us now briefly consider the arrangements that have been made to give the iron monster life and motion. Mr. Brunel decided not to trust so precious a human freight, and so vast an amount of cargo as his big ship is designed to carry to any single propelling power, but resolved to supply it with three&mdash;the screw, the paddle, and the sail.

The paddle-wheels, which are considerably larger than the circus at Astley's, are to be propelled by monster engines, the motive-power of which will be generated by four boilers each weighing about fifty tons, and containing forty tons of water.