28 
a good state of repair would require on the average £18,000 
per annum. In this estimate, besides omitting railways and 
canals, no account has been taken of the expenditure of the 
Local Boards and Highway Boards in maintaining their 
roads and sewers— nor yet of the county authorities in the 
repair of bridges, nor of the gas and water companies in 
repairs of pipes and loss of gas and water. For all this 
destruction of property there is no legal remedy, and no 
compensation whatever is paid. 
The owners whose property suffered so severely applied 
to Parliament to obtain a Bill called “ The Cheshire Salt 
Districts Compensation Bill/’ The object of this Bill was to 
obtain compensation from the salt manufacturers for the 
damage caused by the abstraction of the salt in the form of 
brine. There was no attempt made to obtain payment for 
the salt taken, but merely for the damage done to the pro- 
perty overlying the salt. The Bill was not obtained owing 
to many serious difficulties that would arise in carrying it 
out, but chiefly owing to a very ingenious line of defence 
set up by Mr. De Ranee, a geologist connected with the 
Ordnance Survey Department. He contended that the 
enormous subsidences at Winsford were produced naturally 
by the same causes that produced the Cheshire meres, and 
that the Northwich subsidences were caused by bad mining. 
In my opinion— based upon a far more extensive examina- 
tion of these sinkings than that made by Mr. De Ranee, and 
formed on the spot with the sinkings proceeding daily 
before me for a number of years— Mr. De Ranee’s theories 
are wholly untenable. To attribute to ordinary geological 
causes, which in almost every case work slowly and con- 
tinuously, the enormous subsidences of the last 50 years, 
and more especially those of the last 10 years, and which 
have gone on increasing in the direct ratio of the increase 
in the manufacture of salt, when there is an artificial cause 
at work patent to every one, tends to injure science in the 
eyes of those who know the whole history of these sinkings. 
The manufacture of salt in Cheshire is interesting archseo- 
logically, historically, commercially, and geologically, and it 
is impossible to do full justice to it in one short paper. 
