28 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
INTRODUCTION 
THE KING oF WATERWAYS 
I. When Naaman the Syrian turned away from Elisha in a rage 
it was by a comparison of rivers that he showed his passionate pride 
in the glories of his own land—‘ Are not Abana and Pharphar, rivers 
of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?” Yet, if Jordan were 
as nothing in comparison with the rivers of Damascus, were not Pharphar 
and Abana themselves as nothing in comparison with Euphrates, “that 
great River, the River Euphrates,’’ whose fame will echo down the 
centuries of faith for ever? Besides, there were other and still larger 
streams, of Asian and African renown, and real and fabled immensity. 
There were giants in those days among the old-world rivers. 
But a newworld came into the ken of man,and set other and might- 
ier standards of natural greatness among the rivers of the earth. 
Imagine the wonder of the first western voyagers when they drew up 
the fresh water of the Amazon, while they were still far out of sight of 
land, and surrounded by what they had still supposed to be the vast 
saltness of the South Atlantic! What a river, which could pour its 
own “pomp of waters unwithstood” over the very ocean! Later on, 
this same river was found to be so astonishingly navigable that the 
largest sea-going ships could pass inland, without a hindrance, for at 
least three thousand miles—as far as England is from Equatoria! 
Surely this must be the greatest of all fresh waters, old or new! It 
springs from the Andean fastness of perpetual snow, receives the tribute 
of a hundred tropical streams—each one of which surpasses many a 
principal river of Europe—and then flows out to sea, a long day’s sail 
and more, on its own triumphant course, still the Amazon and still 
fresh. 
But if the whole of the Amazon and all its tributaries, and all 
the other rivers in the Old World and the New, with all their tributaries, 
and every lake in every land as well, were all to unite every drop of 
their fresh waters, they could not equal those which are held in the 
single freshwater reservoir of the five Great Lakes of the St. Lawrence! 
So, if the St. Lawrence River itself, and its many tributaries and 
myriads of minor lakes, are added in, we find how much more than 
half of all the world’s fresh water is really Laurentian. But even this 
is not all. There is more salt water in the mouth and estuary of the 
St Lawrence than in all the mouths and all the estuaries of all other 
rivers. Moreover, all the tides of all these other rivers do not together form 
so vast a volume as that which ebbs and flows inlandward between 
Belle Isle and Lake St. Peter, nine hundred miles apart. Thus, in 
each and all the elements of native grandeur, the Laurentian waters 
