Genre:

News-Commentary, Drollery

Subjects:

Commerce, Engineering, Technology, Vulcanism

    Responds to an article in The Times describing a German journalist's derision at a proposal by some English capitalists to extinguish Mount Vesuvius. Accordingly, the author summarises several bogus projects by which English money 'will be usefully employed' and where 'highly profitable work' can be found. These projects include, setting the Thames on fire in order to 'deodorise and render it salubrious', a touring exhibition of the actual summit of Mont Blanc, importing 'all the gold-fields bodily to England, so as to save the cost of working them so away from home', inducing the sun to shine at night and thus dispensing with burning gas, extracting pea soup from the London fog, and importing Niagara Falls. Concludes by denying the German journalist's claim that the Vesuvius scheme is an English one.