Excerpt from The Channel Railway Connecting England and France: Illustrated by Chart of Soundings, and Lithographed Plans The idea of tunnelling is much the oldest; a French engineer, Mathieu, sixty years ago, considered the work practicable, pre pared plans, and laid them before Napoleon, then First Consul they were some time exposed in the Luxembourg and other public galleries in Paris; but they have long been lost; and there is now, it appears, no account extant of the then proposed method of accomplishing the work. The project of M. De Gamond, also a tunnel, appeared in 1856-7, and may be reckoned, along with others that appeared about the same time, as fruit of the exhibitions of 1851-4. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.