IF EVER there was a subject fit for the hand of the biographer, the story of the Great Eastern is surely it. James Dugan has made the entertaining most of a monstrous but true episode of the high Victorian days, the age of iron and the mechanical engineer. He has written a failure-story far more amusing than most success-stories could be: and out of 692 feet and 12.000 tons of iron he has made a character almost human in its foibles and its superb talent for getting into trouble. Before the Great Eastern had made her first trip to New York, she had eaten up $5,000,000, the first of the fortunes she regularly swallowed on every voyage. She had hardly steamed a few dozen miles when the forward funnel blew out. She passed through the hands of three groups of shareholders before she ever carried a paying passenger. Everything that could possibly happen to a ship happened to the Great Eastern. Tanks of fish oil deluged her engine deck. Two horses died of a bad cold because she passed too close to an iceberg. On her fourth voyage she got stuck in Flushing Bay, at the western end of Long Island Sound, with a gash in her bottom that would have comfortably accommodated an ordinary-sized ship. Storm, mechanical failure, inefficient captains and crew—the Great Eastern had everything. She almost cut New York in two when she first docked. Into her story enter such figures as Cyrus Field—who made use of the Great Eastern to lay the Atlantic cable; Louis Napoleon—he wrested the leviathan just in time from the hands of the Sultan of Turkey, who wanted to use her to house his harem; Jules Verne, Du Chaillu. Indian nabobs, the war correspondent Scott Russell, and dozens of other figures of a bygone age. The whole story is told by Mr. Dugan with an unfailing appreciation of the high, low and medium comedy involved in the Great Eastern’s crazy career, and with a sharp eye for the Victorian background and personalities.