152 Wisco7isin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



feeder. The daily discharge of water in the Wisconsin at 

 Portage City is 259,000,000 cubic feet ; not less than 8,000 

 cubic leet per second. The total daily supply of water for the 

 Erie canal of Pensylvauia, enlarged with a prism greater in 

 area than the one here proposed, is less than 20,000,000 cubic 

 feet — about 231 cubic feet per second — not one-twelfth of the 

 amount available in the Wisconsin, and yet the Erie canal, 

 which is 186 1-2 miles in length, and has a lockage of 926 feet, 

 has sufficient water to pass through the locks 14-4 boats per 

 day, or to carry through the boating season 5,400,000 tons of 

 freight. The Dalles, which is a gorge in the rock about 28 

 miles above Portage, reduces the river at one place 54 feet, so 

 that the extreme of fluctuations from low to high water below 

 the Dalles does not exceed 10 feet, and arrangements could 

 be made, besides supplying the proposed canal, to turn only 

 the desired quantity into the Portage canal and Fox river. 

 Freight could be carried by this line for about one-fourth of 

 what they can by railroad. In view of the great and increas- 

 ing amount of grain annually shipped to the east from the 

 west of the Mississippi, it should be constructed at the earliest 

 practicable day. 



