In a few days a very curious vessel, named Ernest Bazin, will be finished at the Cail Dock-yards, at St. Denis, France. At first glance it looks like a large broad platform, pointed at one end and round at the other. There are three huge hollow disks, or wheels, on each side of the platform, that rest in the water. These wheels support the vessel, and when it is propelled by the use of a screw, the wheels revolve, and the whole structure simply rolls over the surface of the water.

On the platform will be the usual cabins, saloons, etc., and in a boxlike structure that sinks below the platform will be placed the engines. It is claimed by the designers that the motion of the ship will be very slight, thus doing away with seasickness, and the consumption of coal will be considerably less than in ordinary steamships. As the wheels roll over the water, the friction will be lessened, and with this advantage it is expected that the vessel will do some astonishingly quick travelling.

Another curious vessel was finished last June, and lay at a private wharf in Virginia for some time. She was named the Howard Cassard and nicknamed the "Razor-back." With a length of 222 feet, she had only 16 feet beam. Her equilibrium was maintained by an extremely heavy keel and some 50,000 pounds of machinery below the water-line.

The razorlike sharpness of the boat gave it a curious look, and it was expected that when moving through the water the sharp prow would cut it like a knife, thus reducing the resistance to a minimum. The narrowness of her beam necessitated some economy in her interior arrangements, but this was successfully overcome by adopting somewhat the idea of a sleeping-car. But the Howard Cassard was an experiment that evidently has not been successful, as the claim of the designer to cross the ocean in three-fifths of the time now required has as yet not been fulfilled by his odd craft.

Probably one of the strangest ideas in marine construction was that of the man who proposed placing in the stern of a vessel a number of compressed-air cannons. These were to be fired one after the other, the force of the air striking the water and driving the vessel forward. Somewhat similar is the idea of another engineer and inventor. It is to run a series of hollow pipes through the entire length of the keel. The pipes are to receive the water at the bow and carry it to the centre of the vessel, where it is shut off. Then a powerful pressure of compressed air is brought into play, and the separated body of water is shot out of the pipe in the stern, the power of the contact driving the vessel forward. As the water is to be received and discharged alternately, there would be no jerking motion.