The Pictorial handbook of London : comprising its antiquities, architecture, arts, manufacture, trade, social, literary, and scientific institutions, exhibitions, and galleries of art : together with some account of the principal suburbs and most attractive localities ; illustrated with two hundred and five engravings on wood, by Branston, Jewitt, and others and a new and complete map, engraved by Lowry . nally, exposed 832 LONDON. to view the perforations of a sea worm well known by the name of the Teredo Navalis. He passed on, but the thought occurred to him thatthese insects had made diminu
The Pictorial handbook of London : comprising its antiquities, architecture, arts, manufacture, trade, social, literary, and scientific institutions, exhibitions, and galleries of art : together with some account of the principal suburbs and most attractive localities ; illustrated with two hundred and five engravings on wood, by Branston, Jewitt, and others and a new and complete map, engraved by Lowry . nally, exposed 832 LONDON. to view the perforations of a sea worm well known by the name of the Teredo Navalis. He passed on, but the thought occurred to him thatthese insects had made diminutive tunnels; he immediately returned, andthen remarked, with the greatest interest, the manner in which they hadbored through the wood by means of an auger-formed head—how, whenthe excavation was effected, the sides were secured and rendered imper-vious to water by a calcareous secretion with which the insect lines itspassage—and how carefully too near an approach to the water had beenavoided. Sir Isambarts active and ever ready mind soon fertilized the firstcrude idea which Nature had lent to him; and, within a short time, he hadcontrived a mode of forming subaqueous tunnels, by the instrumentalityof a huge iron teredo. Of this plan—the embryo of the ThamesTunnel—-we cannot resist giving a brief sketch. Referring to theannexed woodcuts, the circular framing e e represents the body of the. Fig. l. worm, with its auger-formed heada d, closely resembling in form thetool employed by carpenters forboring wood ; this instrument,being turned round upon a largehollow axis c b, bored its waythrough the ground, which wasg: removed by the miners, as shown||||r in figure 4. As the worm ad-gfc; vanced, leaving a space f f, figure=r 3, small plates of cast-iron wereintroduced, and the whole was in-tended to be afterwards lined withbrickwork, as shown in figures1 and 2. Several years elapsed before SirIsambart brought his plan for-ward, and it was not until theyear 1823 that he exer
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1850, bookidpictorialhan, bookyear1854
