382 BRINDLEY roXSTlUVTS THE PABT V. 



admiration of his "bold and decisiTe strokes of genius," 

 his " penetration which sees into futurity, and prevents 

 obstructions unthought of by the vulgar mind, merely 

 by foreseeing tlieni : a man," says he, " with siieh ideas, 

 moves in a sphere that is to the rest of the world ima- 

 ginary, or at best a terra incognita." 



It would be uninteresting to describe the works of the 

 Bridgewater Canal in detail : one part of a canal is 

 usually so like another, that to do so were merely to 

 involve a needless amount of repetition of a necessarily 

 < 1 ry description. We shall accordingly content < n irse I ves 

 with referring to the original methods by which Brindley 

 contrived to overcome the more important difficulties of 

 the undertaking. From Longford Bridge, where the 

 new works commenced, the canal, which was originally 

 about eight yards wide and four feet deep, was carried 

 upon an embankment of about a mile in extent across 

 the valley of the Mersey. One might naturally suppose 

 that the conveyance of such a mass of earth must have 

 exclusively employed all the horses and carts in the 

 neighbourhood for years. But Brindley, with his usual 

 fertility in expedients, contrived to make the construction 

 of the canal itself subservient to the completion of the 

 remainder. He had the stuff required to make up the 

 embankment brought in boats partly from Worsley and 

 partly from other parts of the canal where the cutting 

 was in excess; and the boats, filled with this stuff, were 

 conducted from the canal along which they had come 

 into caissons or cisterns placed at the point over which 

 the earth and clay had to be deposited. 



The boats, being double, fixed within two feet of each 

 other, had a triangular trough supported between them 

 of sufficient capacity to contain about seventeen tons of 

 earth. The bottom of this trough consisted of a line of 

 trap-doors, which flew open at once on a pin being 

 drawn, and discharged their whole burthen into the 

 bed of the canal in an instant. Thus the level of 



