A £2250000 contract for land reclamation recently placed by the Greek Government with a wel known British engineering company, the only foreign company specializing in civil engineering which is working in Greece, is a fine testimonial to the high regard in which British civil engineering is held by other countries. The work involved, covering an area of about three and three-quarter million acres, is expected to take seven years to complete. When account is taken of the undeveloped nature of the country, which has few adequate roads and bridges and which abounds in marshy stretches, surveying, estimating and the other branches of the preliminary work have in themselves been a series of remarkable triumphs. In spite of these difficulties, quantities of engineering materials, including pieces as heavy as twenty tons, have been carried safely by means of temporary bridges across rivers and swamps—one of which was five miles long—for a distance of eighty miles inland. The total machinery thus transported amounted to 550 tons. In the course of the work rivers will be dammed and dredged, canals excavated, ai great tracts of swamp drained throughout the departments of Boeotia, Thessaly and Epirus on the mainland, and Platania in the island of Crete. One water conduit will have to be tunnelled for two and a half miles through a mountain. The result of the whole. undertaking will be that several thousands of square miles of waste land will be turned into rich and productive agricultural country, watered by an unfailing supply from lakes in the hills.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.