On Saturday last Sir Benjamin Baker, the famous engineer, died
suddenly in his sixty-seventh year. Sir Benjamin Baker, whose name is inseparably associated with some of the greatest engineering feats of the age—the Forth Bridge, and the construction of "tube" railways—was in the best and most honourable sense of the word a self-made man. As Mr. Herbert Spencer noted in his autobiography, be rose to the highest rank of his profession without passing through a curriculum appropriate to his calling or receiving any regular engineering instruction. Perhaps the greatest menu. ment of his skill is the great Amman Dam, the construction of which has quadrupled the prosperity of the dwellers on the Nile and earned for him an honoured place, after Lord Cromer—whose last Memorandum pays a signal tribute to his genius—among the makers of modern Egypt.
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