466 BlUXDLKY'S LAST CANALS. TAUT V. 



mated to be carried annually upon tlie canals of England 

 alone, and this quantity is steadily increasing. 1 In 1835, 

 before the opening of the London and Birmingham Rail- 

 way, the through tonnage carried on the Grand Junction 

 Canal was 310,475 tons ; and in 1845, after the railway 

 had been open for ten years, the tonnage carried 011 the 

 canal had increased to 480,626 tons. At a meeting of 

 proprietors of the Birmingham Canal Navigations, held 

 in October, 1860, the chairman said, "the receipts for 

 the last six months were, with one exception, the largest 

 they had ever had." 



Railways are a great invention, but in their day canals 

 were as highly valued, and indeed quite as important ; 

 and it is fitting that the men by whom they were con- 

 structed should not be forgotten. We may be apt to 

 think lightly of the merits and achievements of the early 

 engineers, now that works of so much greater magnitude 

 are accomplished without difficulty. The appliances of 

 modern mechanics enable men of this day to dwarf by 

 comparison the achievements of their predecessors, wlio 

 had obstructions to encounter which modern engineers 

 know nothing of. The genius of the older men now 

 seems slow, although they were the wonder of their own 

 age. The canal, and its barges tugged along by horses, 

 now appears a cumbersome mode of communication, 

 beside the railway and the locomotive with its power 

 and speed. Yet canals still are, and will long continue 

 to form, an essential part of our great system of commer- 

 cial communication, as much as roads, railways, or the 

 ocean itself. 



1 Braithwaite Poole's ' Statistics of British Commerce.' London, 18f>L'. 



