G.—ENGINEERING 135 
the present century, only a comparatively small area of the fenland had 
been drained, and then almost entirely by antique methods, as by scoop 
wheels driven by windmills or beam engines, whose efficiency was in 
inverse ratio to their esthetic value. Here the development of modern 
steam and oil engine-driven centrifugal pumps has supplied a consider- 
able impetus to reclamation. In China and Japan great areas of waste 
land have similarly been drained and brought into cultivation. 
The economic advantages of irrigation work in Egypt and the Sudan 
are familiar to many. In Egypt during the last fifty years the develop- 
ments are very remarkable for their size and number of installations. 
Only after a visit to that country can one fully appreciate the vastness of 
the enterprise and the work carried out there by the engineer. In the 
Sudan, irrigation schemes date from the Battle of Omdurman, when the 
power of the Mahdi was broken by Lord Kitchener, and the tribes of the 
Sudan, whose previous occupation had been largely that of war, had 
somehow or other to maintain themselves in a country ill supplied by 
nature with the means of peaceful existence. The suggestion that cotton 
could be successfully grown in the Sudan, followed by the construction 
of experimental pumping stations—even so far afield as Fashoda—was 
crowned with success, leading to the foundation of the Gezira Irrigation 
Scheme and to the formation of the Sudan Plantations Syndicate, so that 
to-day the Sudan furnishes a considerable proportion of the world’s 
supply of this commodity, and of the highest quality. In many other 
countries, as Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere, irrigation methods 
only possible by the installation of modern pumping plant have resulted— 
as, for example, at Mildura—in the development of Australia’s great fruit- 
growing industries. 
Another field in which production has been greatly increased by 
mechanical methods is the tin industry of the Federated Malay States. 
The antiquated Chinese method of raising water from mines by means of 
hand buckets, sometimes in one or two up to as many as six stages, was 
slow, laborious and costly, as compared with the use of a centrifugal pump 
of modern type. Again, the method of hydraulicing—where a jet of 
high-pressure water is directed against a hillside, so as to wash it com- 
pletely away for treatment—has provided still further scope for the use 
of centrifugal pumping plant. 
Shipbuilding has always been one of our national industries in which 
we Britishers take a legitimate pride—an industry in which we are leaders 
throughout the world. Wherever the British flag flies, in the Navy or 
the Mercantile Marine, graving or floating docks are to be found. To the 
engineer the design and construction of such docks present problems of 
absorbing interest—problems ever new, since the conditions to be faced 
differ widely between one country and another, requiring special treatment 
to suit the local surroundings. 
To deal adequately with the pumping machinery required for graving 
and floating docks both at home and abroad would take too long, but 
nevertheless it is a subject which has always appealed to me as one not 
only fascinating but full of romance. 
A survey of recent mechanical progress, though only in outline, would 
