THE MONT CENIS TUNNEL.

Westport Times, Volume V, Issue 898, 9 December 1871, Page 3

THE MONT CENIS TUNNEL.

Tbe " Times' special V passes the following eulogium upon the engineers •connected with the carrying out of tbe gigantic undertaking ■: This first experiment on the Mont Cenis route has enabled tbe Italians to reduce the piercing of mountains to a science. Their combination of boring machines, moved by hydraulic power, and acting -at the same time as air-compressing machines to support human life at a ■great -distance from' the earth surface, and, again, in the same act clearing the excavation from the rubbish as the work advances, has given them power, -as we have peon, to work nearly eight times as fast as it could be done by The-old methods. In all these inventions and discoveries some light has ■occasionally been thrown on the subject by foreign engineers ; but all the •merit of application and improvement, all the practical use of these contrivances, are due to the leading engineers ■of the Mont Cenis Tunnel, Grattoni, and Sommeilhr ; the first and second Piedmontese, the lastnamed a Savoyard, but an Italian at heart, and who cast in his lot with his former countrymen at the time that •Savoy was made over to France. Poor Soinmeiller,who was so indefatigable throughout the work, died only two months ago —two months before he could see its inauguration. I had & long talk with Sommeiiler's brother who is also employed as engineer to the works, and whom I met at the tunnel entrance on the Modane side yesterday in the afternoon. It will be long before the world will learn to appreciate all the consummate skill, the inventive resources, the unwearied patience of these heroic engineers in the execution of what was necessarily for several years a tentative work. They were hardly ever at a loss in their reckonings; they hardly ever failed in any of their new and various experiments. With a knowledge of geology, mineralogy, and of hydraulics which reflects the highest honour on their technical schools, they foresaw and provided against any irruption of the waters ; they guessed, as it were, the nature of the strata of rock and soil against which they had to contend, and dealt with the unexplored mountain as if they had known it intuitively by heart, or as if it had stood before them all transparent