fifteen miles from water communication; and most of the large towns, especially in the manufacturing districts, were directly accommodated with the means of easy transport of their goods to the principal markets. "At the beginning of the present century," says Dr. Aiken, writing in 1795, "it was thought a most arduous task to make a high road practicable for carriages over the hills and moors which separate Yorkshire from Lancashire, and now they are pierced through by three navigable canals!"

Notwithstanding the great additional facilities for conveyance of merchandise which have been provided of late years by the construction of railways, a very large proportion of the heavy carrying trade of the country still continues to be conducted upon canals. It was indeed at one time proposed, during the railway mania, and that by a somewhat shrewd engineer, to fill up the canals and make railways of them. It was even predicted, during the construction of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, that "within twelve months of its opening, the Bridgewater Canal would be closed, and the place of its waters be covered over with rushes." But canals have stood their ground, even against railways; and the Duke's Canal, instead of being closed, continues to carry as much traffic as ever. It has lost the conveyance of passengers by the fly-boats, it is true; but it has retained and in many respects increased its traffic in minerals and merchandise. The canals have stood the competition of railways far more

*

*The following curious paragraph is from the Times' of the 19th December, 1806. It relates to the despatching of troops from London for Ireland, during a time of great excitement:-" The first division of the troops that are to proceed by Paddington Canal for Liverpool, and thence by transports for Dublin, will leave Paddington to-day, and will be fol

lowed by others to-morrow, and on Sunday. By this mode of conveyance the men will be only seven days in reaching Liverpool, and with comparatively little fatigue, and it would take them above fourteen days to march that distance. Relays of fresh horses for the canal-boats have been ordered to be in readiness at all the stations." '

CHAP. XII.

MODERN CANAL TRAFFIC.

299

successfully than the old turnpike-roads, though these too are still, in their way, as indispensable as canals and railways themselves. Not less than twenty millions of tons of traffic are estimated to be carried annually upon the canals of England alone, and this quantity is steadily increasing. In 1835, before the opening of the London and Birmingham Railway, the through tonnage carried on the Grand Junction Canal was 310,475 tons; and in 1845, after the railway had been open for ten years, the tonnage carried on the canal had increased to 480,626 tons. At a meeting of proprietors of the Birmingham Canal Navigations, held in October, 1860, the chairman said, "the receipts for the last six months were, with one exception, the largest they had ever had."

Railways are a great invention, but in their day canals were as highly valued, and indeed quite as important; and it is fitting that the men by whom they were constructed should not be forgotten. We may be apt to think lightly of the merits and achievements of the early engineers, now that works of so much greater magnitude are accomplished without difficulty. The appliances of modern mechanics enable men of this day to dwarf by comparison the achievements of their predecessors, who had obstructions to encounter which modern engineers know nothing of. The genius of the older men now seems slow, although they were the wonder of their own age. The canal, and its barges tugged along by horses, may appear a cumbersome mode of communication, beside the railway and the locomotive with its power and speed. Yet canals still are, and will long continue to form, an essential part of our great system of commercial communication,-as much so as roads, railways, or the ocean itself.

APPENDIX.

301

APPENDIX.

THE GRAND CANAL OF LANGUEDOC AND ITS CONSTRUCTOR, PIERRE-PAUL RIQUET DE BONREPOS.

THE Canal du Midi, more commonly known as the Grand Canal of Languedoc, was one of the most important works of the kind at the time at which it was executed, though it has since been surpassed by many canals in France, as well as in England and other countries. It was commenced in 1666, about a hundred years before Brindley began the Bridgewater Canal, and it was finished in 1681. The magnitude and importance of the work will be understood from the following brief statement of facts.

The canal crosses the isthmus which connects France with Spain, along the valley between the Pyrenees and the Rhone, and extends from the Garonne at Toulouse (which is navigable from thence to the Bay of Biscay) to Cette on the shores of the Mediterranean, thus uniting that sea with the Atlantic Ocean. The length of the navigation, from Toulouse to Cette, is about 158 English miles, including its passage through Lake Thau, near Cette, where, in consequence of the shallowness of the lake, it is confined for a considerable distance within artificial dykes. The canal is carried along its course over rivers, and under hills, by means of numerous aqueducts, bridges, and tunnels. From the Garonne to the summit it rises 207 feet by twenty-six locks; the summit level is 33 miles, after which it descends by thirty-seven locks into the Aude near Carcassonne. It then proceeds along the north side of that river, passing over several streams, and descending by twenty-two locks into Lake Thau. There are other locks in the neighbourhood of Toulouse and Cette; the whole number being above a hundred. The fall from the summit at Naurouse to the Mediterranean is 621 feet; a fact of itself which bespeaks the formidable character of the undertaking.

The Grand Canal of Languedoc was constructed by Pierre-Paul Riquet de Bonrepos, a man of extraordinary force of character, bold yet prudent, enterprising and at the same time sagacious and patient, possessed by an inexhaustible capacity for work, and endowed with a faculty for business, as displayed in his organization of the labours of others, amounting to genius. Yet Riquet, like Brindley, was for the most part self-taught, and was impelled by his instincts rather than by his education to enter upon the construction of canals, which eventually became the great business of his life. Presuming that an account of the "French Brindley" will not be uninteresting to English readers, we append the following summary of Riquet's career in connection with the great enterprise in question.

The union of the Mediterranean with the Atlantic by means of a navigable canal across the South of France had long formed the subject of much curious speculation. The design of such a work will be found clearly sketched out in the‘Mémoires de Sully ;' but the project seemed to be so difficult of execution, that no steps were taken to carry it into effect until it was vigorously taken in hand by Riquet in the reign of Louis XIV. Though descended from a noble stock (the Arrighetti or Riquetti of Florence, to a branch of which Riquetti Marquis de Mirabeau belonged), Riquet, at the time he took the scheme in hand, was only a simple exciseman (homme de gabelle). His place of residence was at the village of Bonrepos, situated near the foot of the Montagne Noire, where he owned some property.

France is there at about its narrowest part, and it had naturally occurred to those who speculated on the subject of a canal, that it would be of great public importance if by such means the large navigable river, the Garonne, which flowed into the Western Ocean, could be united to the smaller river, the Aude, which flowed into the Mediterranean. Both had their sources in the Pyrenees, and in one part of their course the rivers were only about fourteen leagues apart. The idea of joining them was thus perfectly simple. The great difficulty was in the execution of the work, the levels being different, and the intervening country rocky and mountainous. The deputies from Languedoc to the States General of Paris had at various times brought the subject of the proposed canal under the notice of the Government, and engineers were even sent into the locality to report as to the feasibility of the scheme; but the