E

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EAGLE

E

E, the fifth letter, is a vowel. It represents seven sounds, the principal ones being the long sound in eve and the short sound in best. Variations of long e are heard in event and eight, of the short e in excuse and horses, the absence of accent on these e's affecting their quality. Other e sounds occur in ever, where, whereby. E at the end of words usually is silent, but indicates that the preceding vowel is long, as in came. Final e after c and g, as in lace and rage, shows that c is s and g is j. E occurs in English words far more frequently than any other letter. Its ā sound comes from the Latin.

Eads (ēdz), James Buchanan. Men with genius for mechanics, as for art, usually give indication of it very early in life. This famous engineer, who built the Eads bridge across the Mississippi at St. Louis, constructed models of saw-mills, fire-engines and steamboats before he was ten years old. He was born at Lawrenceburg Indiana, in 1820. This was before the day of railroads. The commerce of the country was carried on over the waterways, and the Ohio swarmed with every kind of boat that was in use. Perhaps this is the reason the man came to be identified with rivers; the deepening of their channels the bridging of them, the construction of boats, the protection of their banks from erosion.

When he was 13 the family moved to St. Louis, where river life was on a larger, more dramatic scale. One of the first things he did to attract attention was the raising of wrecked boats, for which work he invented improved hoisting-machinery. When the Civil War broke out, he was called to Washington and given a commission to build iron-clad gunboats to patrol the Mississippi. His feat of building and equipping eight such boats in 100 days gave him world-wide fame. From 18Ö7 to 1874 he was engaged in bridging the Mississippi. The Eads bridge is still considered the finest example of metal-arch construction in existence. His next undertaking was the improvement of the South Pass of the Mississippi delta by the use of jetties. Congress approved of his plans to introduce the jetties all the way up to the mouth of the Ohio, but the cost was enormous and the work was never completed. Mr. Eads also proposed to build a ship-railway and then a ship-canal

across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico. Had he lived, this route might have been adopted rather than Panama. He died at Nassau, Bahama Island, March 8, 1887. He received the Albert medal from Queen Victoria and many other decorations and honors from governments and universities. His ashes were scattered on the flood-waters of the Mississippi, according to his will, from the Eads bridge, his only monument.

Eagle, a large bird ofprey, related to buzzards and vultures. There are forty or fifty species of eagles in all countries of the world, but only two kinds occur in North America. These are the golden eagle, common to Europe, Asia and America, and the baldheaded eagle, which is peculiar to North America. The golden eagle is a magnificent, mountain-loving bird; it is found in the United States from Mexico northward, but is far from common. It

IMPERIAL EAGLE

is more abundant in the Old World, but there the sea-eagle is a more common bird. The golden eagle is a large bird of brownish color, the feathers of the head and neck appearing golden in the sunlight. It attains a length of three and one half feet, and nine feet in spread of the wings. Its food is hares, ducks, [lambs, small pigâ and the young of other animals, which it carries away in its talons. It lays two or three whitish eggs with brown spots, usually on inaccessible cliffs. The baldheaded eagle belongs to the group of the sea-eagles and lives near water; it is found on river»