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OTJE COAL AND COAL PORTS. 



By Mk. James Manning. 



[JKeacZ before the Royal Society, December 10, 1873.] 



The very rapidly increasing interest wliieh has been taken in the 

 progressive development of the proposed Illawarra railway, 

 together with the fact that I had been invited by the Grovern- 

 ment to accompany their engineer, Mr. Stephens, on his explora- 

 tion of the projected railroad to the Southern coal-fields, must 

 be my excuse for again handling this subject, and coming before 

 this Society Avith a paper purporting briefly to state what Ave 

 saw on our journey. 



I am aware that a paper of a purely narrative character, such 

 as this purports to be, Avould be against the rules of this Society 

 for admission, were it not that Ave may consider that such narra- 

 tive has arisen entirely from the consequences of the Society's 

 adoption of my former papers on " Our Coal and our Coal Ports," 

 which had for their object the developmt>nt of the resources of 

 the country. I therefore trust I shall not be considered to be 

 out of order in attaching this paper as an appendix to the former 

 ones. 



Preliminarily, I beg to say that before venturing to publish 

 our experiences through your Society, I obtained the consent of 

 the Engineer-in-Chief for Railways, and also that of Mr. Stephens 

 to do so. 



I also wish to premise that after a short visit to Illawarra to form 

 my OAvn opinion of hoAV we could get a railroad into that rich coun- 

 try, I was impressed with the belief that there Avas only one way 

 of getting in and out of IllaAvarra by rail. This route I described 

 in the appendix to the paper read by me on the 3rd Septem- 

 ber last. And noAv that I have returned from a second examina- 

 tion of my first projected line, I have increased good opinion of 

 its efficacy, and would maintain its intrinsic value ; but subse- 

 quent investigation and researches, consequent on my first action, 

 has led to the discovery of an infinitely better route. With re- 

 gard therefore to my first projected line, it was to have commenced 

 from Bulli by a gradual acclivity towards the Bottle Forest Eoad 

 and Sydney, by way of the formidable " coal clifii"" which rises 

 perpendicularly from the sea. This difficulty I proposed at first 



