XXXVI. T. W. KEELE. 
necessary to submit questions relating to the amount of 
storage which should be provided, affecting the height to 
which the dam should be raised, and also the cost of the 
structure, to two separate Royal Commissions while the 
work was proceeding, and it will sufflce to say, that the 
great dam as it stands completed to-day, is the materiali- 
zation of the views held by the present Lord Mayor of 
Sydney, The Right Hon. Thomas Hughes, and myself as 
expressed in the minority report of the Royal Commission 
of 1902. The justification of the position then taken up, 
and the strenuous efforts subsequently put forward on 
behalf of the citizens, by the advocates for the larger and 
more generous provision which that dam is capable of 
affording them, have yet to be consummated. 
We are now at the termination of one of the longest 
droughts of which we have any record, and the pendulum 
of the seasons is just on the point of swinging the other 
way. Let us hope, therefore, that the demonstration will 
be complete, and that it will not be long deferred. The 
Storage now available at the Cataract reservoir, has set 
at rest the anxiety which has always been experienced 
whenever the exigencies of the water supply to the 
Metropolis has necessitated the drawing down of the 
water in Prospect reservoir below the level where the 
movements in the embankment have been observed, and it 
will now be possible to adjust the withdrawals of water 
from that reservoir, in such a manner as to avoid all risk 
to the structure, while leaving room in it for the freshets 
of the Upper Nepean and Cordeaux Rivers, which otherwise 
would waste to the sea, if Prospect were always to be 
kept full. 
Melbourne Water Supply.—Melbourne affords a striking 
example of the hand to mouth policy in connection with water 
supply. There they depend largely on the daily flow of the 
a 
