the design will be admired by every true artist. It is regarded as a great ornament, and is thoroughly in keeping with the beauty of the surrounding scenery.

Shortly after the death of Lord Nelson it was proposed to erect a monument to his memory on the Calton Hill. My father supplied a design, which was laid before the Monument Committee. It was so much approved that the required sum was rapidly subscribed. But as the estimated cost of this erection was found slightly to exceed the amount subscribed, a nominally cheaper design was privately adopted. It was literally a job. The vulgar, churn-like monument was thus thrust on the public and actually erected; and there it stands to this day, a piteous sight to beholders. It was eventually found greatly to exceed in cost the amount of the estimate for my father's design. I give a sketch of my father's memorial; and I am led to do this because it is erroneously alleged that he was the architect of the present inverted spy glass, called "Nelson's Monument"

Nelson's Monument as it should have been.

Then, with respect to my father's powers as a mechanic. This was an inherited faculty, and I leave my readers to infer from the following pages whether I have not had my fair share of this inheritance. Besides his painting room, my father had a workroom fitted up with all sorts of mechanical tools. It was one of his greatest pleasures to occupy himself there as a relief from sitting at the easel, or while within doors from the inclemency of the weather. The walls and shelves of his workroom were crowded with a multitude of artistic and ingenious mechanical objects, nearly all of which were the production of his own hands. Many of them were associated with the most eventful incidents in his life. He only admitted his most intimate friends, or such as could understand and appreciate the variety of objects connected with art and mechanism, to his workroom. His natural taste for neatness and arrangement gave it a very orderly aspect, however crowded its walls and shelves might be. Everything was in its place, and there was a place for everything. It was in this workroom that I first began to handle mechanical tools. It was my primary technical school -- the very foreground of my life.

Bow-and-string Roofs and Bridges

I may mention one or two of my father's mechanical efforts, or rather his inventions in applied science. One of the most important was the "bow-and-string bridge," as he first called it, to which he early directed his attention. He invented this important method of construction about the year 1794. The first bow-and- string bridge was erected in the island of St. Helena over a deep ravine.

Many considered, from its apparent slightness, that it was not fitted to sustain any considerable load. A remarkable and convincing proof was, however, given of its stability by the passage over it of a herd of wild oxen, that rushed across without the slightest damage to its structure. After so severe a test it was for many succeeding years employed as a most valuable addition to the accessibility of an important portion of the island. The bow-and-string bridge has since been largely employed in spanning wide spaces over which suburban and other railways pass, and in roofing over such stations as those at Birmingham, Charing Cross, and other Great Metropolitan centres, as well as in bow-and-string bridges over rivers. I give the fac-simile of his original drawings[note: The original drawings of these bow-and-string bridges, of various spans, are now deposited at the Gallery of the Museum of Naval Architecture at South Kensington, and are signed "Alexander Nasmyth 1796."]

for the purpose of showing our great railway engineers the originator of the graceful and economical method of spanning wide spaces, now practised in every part of the civilised world

Another of his inventions was the method of riveting by compression instead of by blows of the hammer. It originated in a slight circumstance. One wet, wintry Sunday morning he went into his workroom. There were some slight mechanical repairs to be performed upon a beautiful little stove of his own construction. To repair it, iron rivets were necessary to make it serviceable. But as the hammering of the hot rivets would annoy his neighbours by the unwelcome sound of the hammer, he solved the difficulty by using