1. Valves.

1. Valves.

2. Tractors.

3. Egg-beaters.

4. Styles in landscape painting.

5. Systems of bookkeeping.

6. Methods of learning a foreign language.

7. Churns.

8. Methods of packing apples.

IX. In the following selection you will find an account of how an engineering problem was solved. With this as a model, write an account of any of the following:

1. The Shoshone, or Keokuk, or Roosevelt Dam.

2. The Panama Canal.

3. The Cape Cod Canal.

4. The Chicago Drainage Canal.

5. The Chicago Breakwater.

6. The Galveston Sea Wall.

7. The Key West Railroad.

8. The Mississippi Levees.

9. An Army Cantonment.

10. A Shipyard.

11. A Big City Subway.

12. Some Development in Your Own Town.

The construction of the reservoirs and aqueduct for bringing a daily supply of five hundred million gallons into New York from the Catskill Mountains has involved engineering work of great magnitude, and in some cases of considerable perplexity and difficulty. As it turned out, the most serious problem was encountered at the Hudson River, where the engineers had to determine upon the best method for conducting the water past that great natural obstacle.

Four alternative plans were considered: first, to lay steel pipes in trenches dredged across the river bottom; second, to drive a tunnel through the glacial deposit in the river bottom; third, to carry the aqueducts across the river on a bridge; and lastly, to build a huge inverted siphon at a depth sufficient to bring it entirely within the solid underlying rock. The last was the plan adopted.

To determine the depth and character of the rock, fifteen vertical holes were drilled from the surface of the river, and two inclined holes, of different degrees of inclination, were driven from each shore. Six of the vertical holes reached bed rock, and one of them in the center of the river reached an ultimate depth of 768 feet, when it had to be abandoned without reaching bed rock. This boring developed the fact that the present Hudson River flows in an old glacial gorge which has been filled up with deposits of silt, sand, gravel, clay, and boulders to a depth of over 800 feet.

Now it was realized that a deep-pressure tunnel, to be perfectly reliable, must lie in absolutely sound and unfissured rock; and since it was impossible to test the rock by vertical borings made from scows anchored in the river, the engineers determined to explore the underlying material by means of inclined borings driven from either shore. Accordingly, two shafts were sunk to a depth of between two and three hundred feet, and from them two diamond drill borings were started, which ultimately crossed at a depth of 1500 feet below the surface of the river. A good rock was found at that level. To make the survey more reliable, a second pair of holes was drilled at a less inclination, which crossed at a depth of 950 feet below the river surface. The rock was found to be perfectly satisfactory, and such water as was found was limited in extent and due to well-understood geologic causes.

It was therefore determined to sink the east and west shafts to a depth of from 1150 to 1200 feet below ground surface, and connect them by a tunnel 3022 feet in length at a depth of 1100 feet below the river surface. The shafts have been sunk, that on the West Shore to 1153 feet, the East Shore shaft to 1185 feet, and the boring of the tunnel toward the center of the river has made good progress, the easterly section having advanced at the present writing about 260 feet, and the westerly section 170 feet from their respective shafts. Both the shafts and the tunnel will be lined with a high grade of Portland cement concrete which will give them a finished internal diameter of 14 feet. The aqueduct reaches the Hudson River at an elevation of 400 feet above mean water level. Hence the total head of water is about 1500 feet, and the total pressure on each square foot of the tunnel is 46 1/2 tons, which is balanced with a wide margin of safety by the weight of the super-incumbent mass of rock, silt, and water.[65]

[65] "The Catskill Water Supply Tunnel," in the _Scientific American_, vol. 104. By courtesy of The Scientific American Publishing Company.

X. In the following account of an emotional and mental process what root principle do you find? Does the author show traces of influence from the intended readers, the American public? Does the author take too much for granted in the reader, or not enough? Does she show tact in approaching the reader? Write the account in an impersonal, abstract way, as if you were reporting "a case" for a statistician, and then give your estimate of the two. What light does your estimate throw upon the advice to make the actors in a process specific?

How long would you say, wise reader, it takes to make an American? By the middle of my second year in school I had reached the sixth grade. When, after the Christmas holidays, we began to study the life of Washington, running through a summary of the Revolution, and the early days of the Republic, it seemed to me that all my reading and study had been idle until then. The reader, the arithmetic, the song book, that had so fascinated me until now, became suddenly sober exercise books, tools wherewith to hew a way to the source of inspiration. When the teacher read to us out of a big book with many bookmarks in it, I sat rigid with attention in my little chair, my hands tightly clasped on the edge of my desk; and I painfully held my breath, to prevent sighs of disappointment escaping, as I saw the teacher skip the parts between bookmarks. When the class read, and it came my turn, my voice shook and the book trembled in my hands. I could not pronounce the name of George Washington without a pause. Never had I prayed, never had I chanted the songs of David, never had I called upon the Most Holy, in such utter reverence and worship as I repeated the simple sentences of my child's story of the patriot. I gazed with adoration at the portraits of George and Martha Washington, till I could see them with my eyes shut. And whereas formerly my self-consciousness had bordered on conceit, and I thought myself an uncommon person, parading my schoolbooks through the streets, and swelling with pride when a teacher detained me in conversation, now I grew humble all at once, seeing how insignificant I was beside the Great.

As I read about the noble boy who would not tell a lie to save himself from punishment, I was for the first time truly repentant of my sins. Formerly I had fasted and prayed and made sacrifice on the Day of Atonement, but it was more than half play, in mimicry of my elders. I had no real horror of sin, and I knew so many ways of escaping punishment. I am sure my family, my neighbors, my teachers in Polotzk--all my world, in fact--strove together, by example and precept, to teach me goodness. Saintliness had a new incarnation in about every third person I knew. I did respect the saints, but I could not help seeing that most of them were a little bit stupid, and that mischief was much more fun than piety. Goodness, as I had known it, was respectable, but not necessarily admirable. The people I really admired, like my Uncle Solomon, and Cousin Rachel, were those who preached the least and laughed the most. My sister Frieda was perfectly good, but she did not think the less of me because I played tricks. What I loved in my friends was not inimitable. One could be downright good if one really wanted to. One could be learned if one had books and teachers. One could sing funny songs and tell anecdotes if one traveled about and picked up such things, like one's uncles and cousins. But a human being strictly good, perfectly wise, and unfailingly valiant, all at the same time, I had never heard or dreamed of. This wonderful George Washington was as inimitable as he was irreproachable. Even if I had never, never told a lie, I could not compare myself to George Washington; for I was not brave--I was afraid to go out when snowballs whizzed--and I could never be the First President of the United States.

So I was forced to revise my own estimate of myself. But the twin of my new-born humility, paradoxical as it may seem, was a sense of dignity I had never known before. For if I found that I was a person of small consequence, I discovered at the same time that I was more nobly related than I had ever supposed. I had relatives and friends who were notable people by the old standards,--I had never been ashamed of my family,--but this George Washington, who died long before I was born, was like a king in greatness, and he and I were Fellow Citizens. There was a great deal about Fellow Citizens in the patriotic literature we read at this time; and I knew from my father how he was a Citizen, through the process of naturalization, and how I also was a citizen, by virtue of my relation to him. Undoubtedly I was a Fellow Citizen, and George Washington was another. It thrilled me to realize what sudden greatness had fallen on me; and at the same time it sobered me, as with a sense of responsibility. I strove to conduct myself as befitted a Fellow Citizen.

Before books came into my life, I was given to star-gazing and day-dreaming. When books were given me, I fell upon them as a glutton pounces on his meat after a period of enforced starvation. I lived with my nose in a book, and took no notice of the alternations of the sun and stars. But now, after the advent of George Washington and the American Revolution, I began to dream again. I strayed on the common after school instead of hurrying home to read. I hung on fence rails, my pet book forgotten under my arm, and gazed off to the yellow-streaked February sunset, and beyond, and beyond. I was no longer the central figure of my dreams; the dry weeds in the lane crackled beneath the tread of Heroes.

What more could America give a child? Ah, much more! As I read how the patriots planned the Revolution, and the women gave their sons to die in battle, and the heroes led to victory, and the rejoicing people set up the Republic, it dawned on me gradually what was meant by _my country_. The people all desiring noble things, and striving for them together, defying their oppressors, giving their lives for each other--all this it was that made _my country_. It was not a thing that I _understood_; I could not go home and tell Frieda about it, as I told her other things I learned at school. But I knew one could say "my country" and _feel_ it, as one felt "God" or "myself." My teacher, my schoolmates, Miss Dillingham, George Washington himself could not mean more than I when they said "my country," after I had once felt it. For the Country was for all the Citizens, and I _was a Citizen_. And when we stood up to sing "America," I shouted the words with all my might. I was in very earnest proclaiming to the world my love for my newfound country.

"I love thy rocks and rills, Thy woods and templed hills."

Boston Harbor, Crescent Beach, Chelsea Square--all was hallowed ground to me. As the day approached when the school was to hold exercises in honor of Washington's Birthday, the halls resounded at all hours with the strains of patriotic songs; and I, who was a model of the attentive pupil, more than once lost my place in the lesson as I strained to hear, through closed doors, some neighboring class rehearsing "The Star-Spangled Banner." If the doors happened to open, and the chorus broke out unveiled--

"O! say, does that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave O'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?"

delicious tremors ran up and down my spine, and I was faint with suppressed enthusiasm.[66]

[66] Mary Antin: _The Promised Land_. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, publishers.

Write an account of any of the following processes _as processes_.

1. The high school "star" learns in college that other bright people exist.