MR M‘ASLAN’S SCHEME.

Evening Star, Volume VIII, Issue 2090, 17 January 1870, Page 2

MR M‘ASLAN’S SCHEME.

To the Editor of the Evening Star. Sir—l read with pleasure your correspondent P. F. M.’a letter in your Saturday’s paper, so far as it show's what an ingenious man judged to bo practicable 40 years ago, may, with the great advances made in engineering science, experience, and appliances since, be now' considered easy of accomplishment. I would be obliged to P. F. M. stating, if he can in a measure do so, the means by which Mr Marshall proposed to carry out his scheme, as, at the period stated —4O years ago—the first British railway was but in course of construction, and the locomotive, as a means of haulage, under experiment, The “ patent slip,” with its rails and

wheeled cradle, was not then in operation, and the present Panama line did not even exist in imagination : without which adjuncts I would not have mooted my idea, and without which Mr Marshall's scheme, as affirmed by P. F. M., cannot be the same scheme as mine. I do not doubt nor dispute P. F. M.’s statement; but certainly I never heard nor read of Mr Marshall, of Queensferry, nor of his proposition having been laid before the then British Government.—l am, Ac. Bob. M‘Aslan. Dunedin, 17 th Jan.