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Stephenson will live as long in connection with the great Tubular Bridge and the other mighty works of which he was the chief designer and constructor.

Robert Stephenson first saw the light in the village of Willington, at a cottage which his father occupied after his marriage with Miss Fanny Henderson — a marriage contracted on the strength of his first appointment as “breaksman ” to the engine employed for lifting the ballast brought by the return collier ships to Newcastle. Here Robert was bora on the 17th of November, 1803. As the cottage looked out upon a tram-way, the eyes of the child were naturally familiarised from infancy with sights and scenes most nearly connected with his future profession. At this time, George Stephenson's means were small, as indeed may be guessed from the fact, that nearly ten years later he thought himself a happy man when he succeeded in obtaining a post as engineer to a colliery with a salary of 100l. a year. Notwithstanding these slender resources, the liberal- minded father found means to give his son such an education as could be obtained in a provincial town, to which the energy and industry of the son superadded such of the rudiments of mechanics and engineering science as he could pick up in the long winter evenings, in the library of the Literary and Philosophical Institute at Newcastle. Mr. Smiles tells us how keenly the father felt as he grew up the want of a solid education, and how perseveringly he laboured, after reaching the years of manhood, to make up for lost school-time during his leisure moments, and how he resolved that, poor as he was, his son should not suffer, in like manner, by the want of early instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic, to which he added mechanics as a fourth desideratum. The rudimentary and experimental knowledge which Robert picked up in his father's workshop, came in naturally to the aid of the theoretic teaching of books, and supplemented his science by practical capacity. As an early proof of the latter, we may mention that there still stands over the door of the cottage at Killingworth, then occupied by George Stephenson, a sun-dial, the production of the hands of the son, at the age of thirteen, a work to which the elder Stephenson looked back with an honest pride to his dying day.

It is now just forty years ago since Robert was taken from school and taught to feel the truth of the old saying of Persius, Magister artis venter. In 1818 or 1819, we find him apprenticed as an under- viewer to a coal mine in the neighbourhood of the place in which he had spent his childhood. Having devoted a year or two to making himself practically acquainted with the machinery and working of a colliery, he was sent to the University of Edinburgh, where he spent a session in attending the courses of lectures on chemistry, natural philosophy, and geology. How far he may have profited by this opportunity of increasing his scientific knowledge, we have the means of ascertaining, for he brought home a prize for mathematics, much to the delight of his father. He knew the value of opportunities, and he had the great secret of success— * the art of availing himself of them. His mind was too eminently practical to forego any study or pursuit which was calculated, even in its remoter bear- ings, to help him on in the great struggle of life: and happy, indeed, are they who can look back with regret upon so few opportunities missed, so few court cards thrown away out of their hands, as Robert Stephenson.

Having spent a year or two as an apprentice in his father’s manufactory of locomotives at Newcastle (even at that time a school, if not of thought, yet of action), and two or three more years in South America, whither he was sent to examine and report upon the gold and silver mines of Columbia, he returned to England at the close of 1827. He found the public mind greatly excited upon the railway question. “Can locomotives be successfully and profitably employed for passenger traffic?” was still a moot point, of which his father sustained the affirmative, alone against a host. It was almost a repetition of Athanasius contra mundum, when George Stephenson fought the battle of the Locomotive — of the Rail and Wheel — or as he himself termed them, “Man and Wife.” Mr. Smiles tells us how he struggled for their conjunction in the committee-room of the House of Commons, and when men deemed him all but a maniac for persevering in his theory, how bravely and tenaciously he persisted till he had succeeded. Joining forces with Mr. Joseph Locke, the eminent engineer, the son not only wrote the ablest pamphlets on the subject in debate, but he greatly aided his father in the construction of the Rocket — the celebrated prize locomotive— whose powers as displayed at Liverpool at once settled the question at issue: just as the trial trip of the Great Eastern has settled, we presume, the much-debated point as to whether so large a ship can possibly be manageable in a heavy sea.

One of those best qualified to speak to his contributions to the development of the locomotive-engine informs us that, from about five years from his return from America, Robert Stephenson's attention was chiefly directed to its improvement. “None but those who accompanied him during the period in his incessant experiments can form an idea of the amazing metamorphosis which the machine underwent in it. The most elementary principles of the application of heat; of the mode of calculating the strength of cylindrical and other boilers; of the strength of rivetting and of staying flat portions of the boilers, were then far from being understood, and each step in the improvement of the engine had to be confirmed by the most careful experiments before the brilliant results of the Rocket and Planet engines (the latter being the type of the existing modern locomotive) could be arrived at.”

Stephenson’s time was not, however, so fully taken up during the above interval as to preclude attention to his other civil engineering business, and he executed within it the Leicester and Swannington, Whitby and Pickering, Canterbury and Whitstable, and Newton and Warrington Railways, while he also erected an extensive manufactory for locomotives at Newton, in Lancashire, in partnership with the Messrs.