Professor Buckland on Artesian Wells. 325 



gers, and in the pounds, shillings, and pence, in the ledgers 

 of manufacturers. In November 1840, notice was given of 

 an application to be made to Parliament to obtain a new sup- 

 ply of water for London, from wells and water-works to be made 

 at Watford, in the chalk. A company had been proposed to 

 effect this object, which would, probably, have been carried, had 

 not Mr Clutterbuck demonstrated, by a long-continued series of 

 measurements of the water in the chalk hills of Hertfordshire, 

 near Watford, that every drop of water taken from that 

 neighbourhood would have been abstracted from the summer 

 and autumn supplies of the river Colne, and would have rob- 

 bed the proprietors of more than thirty mills upon this river 

 and its tributaries, and the owners of the adjacent water- 

 meadows, frights which they had inherited from time imme- 

 morial. One intelligent manufacturer of paper, Mr Dicken- 

 son, who now supplies the paper for stamped letter-covers, 

 and whose mills were on one of the tributaries of the Colne, 

 had, during many years, found arithmetical evidence that the 

 quantity of summer water in that river varied with the quan- 

 tity of rain in the preceding winter. He could always tell in 

 the end of February or March how much water there would 

 be in these rivers in the following eight or nine months, and 

 he regulated the contracts he made in every spring for paper 

 to be delivered in the summer and autumn by the quantity 

 of water in his winter rain-gauge. This rain-gauge, the in- 

 vention of Dalton, being buried three feet below the surface, 

 shewed that, except in December, January, and February, rain- 

 water rarely descends more than three feet below the soil, so 

 as to add anything to the supply that sinks into the earth to 

 issue during summer, and form springs and rivers ; and 

 whenever Mr Dickenson found, by this instrument, that but 

 little rain had fallen in the three months of winter, he pro- 

 portionally limited his contracts for the following summer 

 and autumn ; thus proving the practical advantage of induc- 

 tions from philosophy, and shewing that paper-making was 

 dependent on meteorology, on hydrostatics, and on geology. 

 In Germany, Mr Bruckman of Heilbronn, published, in 1835, 

 an octavo volume on the Artesian wells in the valley of the 

 Neckar, from which it appeared that there were manufactories 



