[189] The woodcut, fig. 22, is a reduction of part of this drawing.
[190] The case of Ranger v. the Great Western Railway Company.
[192] The remainder of this letter is printed above, p. [192].
[193] Although Mr. Brunel endeavoured, as far as possible, to lay aside work during his visits to Watcombe, he found occasions for the use of his mechanical knowledge. He prepared tools for transplanting young trees; he did not, however, succeed in making them flourish as well as before they were transplanted, though he attended to the work himself, and took care that a large amount of earth was moved with the tree. The bridge of rough poles across the turnpike road between Teignmouth and Torquay is as good of its kind as his larger works.
[194] On June 10, 1830, when he was twenty-four years old, Mr. Brunel was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He subsequently became a member of most of the other scientific societies; but he rarely attended any meetings, except those of the Institution of Civil Engineers.
[195] At the beginning of 1858, on the expiration of Mr. Robert Stephenson’s term of office as President of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Mr. Brunel came next in rotation for election; but his failing health, and the pressure of his professional duties, led him to request that he might not then be put in nomination.—- See Inaugural Address of John Fowler, Esq., January 9, 1866.
[196] A drawing of their Nile boat, the ‘Florence,’ which he made for his daughter, exhibits the same beautiful minuteness which appears in all his early sketches for the Clifton bridge and Great Western Railway.
[197] Mr. Brunel’s Nile boat, being of iron, could not safely go up the Cataracts.
[198] A few weeks after Mr. Brunel’s death, a meeting of his friends was held, when it was determined to raise some memorial to him. A statue was made by the late Baron Marochetti, and a site for it promised by the First Commissioner of Works; but it has not yet been erected.