44 



NATURE 



[September io, 1914 



earliest times advantage has been taken of the undu- 

 lating character of the country to dam up some low 

 ground or gorge between two hills, above which the 

 drainage of a large area is collected. Such artificial 

 reservoirs are peculiar to the granitic country, and 

 wherever groups of granite hills occur tanks are sure 

 to be found associated with them." Take again the 

 great ship canals. The Suez Canal runs for loo miles 

 from sea to sea, though for part of its course it runs 

 through water, not through sand. It is constantly 

 growing in depth and width. Its original depth was 

 26i ft. ; it is now, for nine-tenths of its length, more 

 than 36 ft., and the canal is to be further deepened 

 generally to more than 39 ft. Its original width at 

 the bottom was 72 ft. ; it is now, for most of its course, 

 more than 147 ft. ; in other words, the width has been 

 more than doubled. A writer in the Times on the 

 wonderful Panama Canal said: "The locks and the 

 Gatun dam have entailed a far larger displacement of 

 the earth's surface than has ever been attempted by 

 the hand of man in so limited a space." Outside the 

 locks the depth is 45 ft., and the minimum bottom 

 width 300 ft. The official handbook of the Panama 

 Canal says : " It is a lake canal as well as a lock canal, 

 its dominating feature being Gatun Lake, a great 

 body of water covering about 164 square miles." The 

 canal is only fifty miles long from open sea to open 

 sea, from shore line to shore line only forty. But in 

 making it man, the geographical agency, Has blocked 

 the waters of a river, the Chagres, by building up a 

 ridge which connects the two lines of hills between 

 which the river flows, this ridge being a dam i^ miles 

 long, nearly half a mile wide at its base, and rising to 

 105 ft. above sea-level, with the result that a lake has 

 come into existence which is three-quarters of the size 

 of the Lake of Geneva, and extends beyond the limits 

 of the Canal zone. 



Mr. Marsh, in his book, referred to far more colossal 

 schemes for turning land into water, such as flooding 

 the African Sahara or cutting a canal from the Medi- 

 terranean to the Jordan and this submerging the basin 

 of the Dead Sea, which is below the level of the ocean. 

 The effect of the latter scheme, he estimated, would 

 be to add from 2000 to 3000 square miles to the fluid 

 surface of Syria. All that can be said is that the wild- 

 cat schemes of one century often become the domesti- 

 cated possibilities of the next and the accomplished 

 facts of the third ; that the more discovery of new- 

 lands passes out of sight the more men's energies and 

 imagination will be concentrated upon developing and 

 altering what is in their keeping; and that, judging 

 from the past, no unscientific man can safely set any 

 limit whatever to the future achievements of science. 



But now, given that the proportion of land to water 

 and water to land has not been, and assuming that it 

 will not be, appreciably altered, has water, for practical 

 purposes, encroached on land, or land on water? In 

 many cases water transport has encroached on land 

 transport. The great isthmus canals are an obvious 

 instance; so are the great Canadian canals. The ton- 

 nage passing through the locks of the Sault St.-Marie 

 is greater than that which is carried through the Suez 

 Canal. Waterways are made where there was dry 

 land, and more often existing inland waterways are 

 converted into sea-going ways. Manchester has be- 

 come a seaport through its Ship Canal. The Clyde, in 

 Mr. Vernon Harcourt's words, written in 189 -, has 

 been "converted from an insignificant stream into a 

 deep navigable river capable of giving access to ocean- 

 going vessels of largfe draught up to Glasgow." In 

 1758 the Clyde at low water at Glasgow was only 

 15 inches deep, and until 1818 no seagoing vessels came 

 up to Glasgow. In 1895 the depth at low water was 

 from 17 to 20 ft., and steamers with a maximum 

 draught of 25^ ft. could go up to Glasgow. This was 



NO. 2341, VOL. 94] 



the result of dredging, deepening and widening the 

 river, and increasing the tidal flow. The record of th< 

 Tyne has been similar. The effect of dredging th- 

 Tyne was that in 1895 — I quote Mr. Harcourt again— 

 "Between Shields and Newcastle, where formerly 

 steamers of only 3 to 4 ft. draught used to ground for 

 hours, there is now a depth of 20 ft. throughout at 

 the lowest tides." It is because engineers have arti- 

 ficially improved Nature's jvork on the Clyde and the 

 Tyne that these rivers have become homes of ship- 

 building for the whole world. Building training walls 

 on the Seine placed Rouen, seventy-eight miles up the 

 river, high among the seaports of France. The Elbe 

 and the Rhine, the giant rivers Mississippi and St. 

 Lawrence, and many other rivers, have, as we all 

 know, been wonderfully transformed by the hand of 

 the engineer. 



But land in turn, in this matter of transport, has 

 encroached upon sea. In old days, when roads were 

 few and bad, when there were no railways, and when 

 ships were small, it was all-important to bring goods 

 by water at all parts as far inland as possible. In 

 England there were numerous flourishing little ports 

 in all the estuaries and up the rivers, which, under 

 modern conditions, have decayed. No one now thinks 

 of Canterbury and Winchester in connection with sea- 

 borne traffic; but Mr. Belloc, in "The Old Road," a 

 description of the historical Pilgrims' Way from Win- 

 chester to Canterbury, points out how these two old- 

 world cathedral cities took their origin and derived 

 their importance from the fact that each of them, 

 Canterbury in particular, was within easy reach of the 

 coast, where a crossing from France would be made ; 

 each on a river — in the case of Canterbury on the Stour 

 just above the end of the tideway. In the days when 

 the Island of Thanet was really an island, separated 

 from the rest of Kent by an arm of the sea, and when 

 the present insignificant river Stour was, in the words 

 of the historian J. R. Green, "a wide and navigable 

 estuary," Canterbury was a focus to which the mer- 

 chandise of six Kentish seaports was brought, to pass 

 on inland ; it was in effect practically a seaport. Now 

 merchandise, except purely local traffic, comes to a few 

 large ports only, and is carried direct by rail to great 

 distant inland centres. Reclus wrote that bays are 

 constantly losing in comparative importance as the 

 inland ways of rapid communication increase ; that, in 

 all countries intersected with railways, indentations in 

 the coast-line have become rather an obstacle than an 

 advantage ; and that maritime commerce tends more 

 and more to take for its starting-place ports situated 

 at the end of a peninsula. He argues, in short, that 

 traffic goes on land as far out to sea as possible instead 

 of being brought by water as far inland as possible. 

 He clearly overstated the case, but my contention is 

 that, for human purposes, the coast-line, though the 

 same on the map, has practically been altered by 

 human agency. Ports have been brought to men as 

 much as men to ports. We see before our eyes the 

 process going on of bridging India to Ceylon so as to 

 carry goods and passengers as far by land as possible, 

 and in Ceylon we see the great natural harbour of 

 Trincomalee practically deserted and a wonderful arti- 

 ficial harbour created at the centre of population, 

 Colombo. 



But let us carry the argument a little further. Great j 

 Britain is an island. Unless there is some great con- ' 

 vulsion of Nature, to all time the Straits of Dover will 

 separate it from the continent of Europe. Yet we have 

 at this moment a renewal of the scheme for a Channel 

 tunnel, and at this moment men are flying: from 

 England to France and France to England. Suppose 

 the Channel tunnel to be made; suppose flying to be 

 improved — and it is improving every day — what will 

 become of the island? What will become of the sea? 



