and nuts.

[Illustration: GAS LIGHT BUOY.]

* * * * *

PROJECT FOR A ROADSTEAD AT HAVRE.

The present port of Havre is absolutely insufficient to answer the ever
increasing requirements of commerce. Its entrance, which is too narrow and
not deep enough, does not permit steamers to go in, come out, and perform
their evolutions with the rapidity required by our epoch. So they are
gradually abandoning our port, and going to load and unload at Anvers and
elsewhere. A large number of wise heads, who are anxious about the future
of this port and our national interests, have devoted themselves to
finding a means of enlarging it, not by dredging _new_ basins, which would
prove ruinous to the budget and useless in twenty years, but by installing
a true roadstead at the entrance to the present basins.

[Illustration: FIG 1.--PLAN OF THE PROJECTED ROADSTEAD AT HAVRE.]

Upon the maps of the hydrographic service may be seen, under the name of
the Little Roadstead, a vast extent of sea nearly two kilometers wide by
three to four in length, bounded upon one side by the heights of Heve and
St. Adresse, and upon the other by the rocky line of Eclat and of the
heights of the roadstead (Fig. 1). This Little Roadstead, so called, in
order to become a genuine one, would have to be protected against the
great waves of the open sea. To thus protect it, to close it as quickly
and as cheaply as possible--that is the problem.

In 1838, Charles de Massas presented a project (the first in order of
date), which consisted in constructing upon the Eclat reef a semi-lunate
dike, and a breakwater at Cape Heve. Moreover, upon the emergent parts of
the Eclat reef and heights of the roadstead he proposed to erect two
forts.

[Illustration: FIG. 2.--LEWIS' FLOATING BREAKWATER.]

The defense of the port of Havre is a very important question, and one
that appears to be completely abandoned. Since Engineer Degaulle in 1808
advised the erection of a fort upon the Eclat, and requests have
periodically been made and projects drawn. The requests are forgotten, but
the drawings are in the Ministers' portfolios, and if France should
to-morrow have a war with a maritime power our great northern port might
be destroyed and burned by the smallest squadron.

Some years after Massas' project, two officers, Deloffre and Bleve, and an
engineer named Renaud, received a commission to search for a means of
closing a portion