Feb., 1889. 
MIDDLE LIAS OF NORTHAMPTONSHIRE. 
45 
modern improvements in country and town tend to make it 
more so, both because more water is used, and special facilities 
are given for the water not immediately required to find its 
way into the main streams, sometimes polluting them, and 
sometimes causing them to overflow. 
Of course the rapid removal of all stagnant surface water 
is highly desirable, and in a country like England, the 
atmosphere of which usually has plenty of moisture in it, a 
diminution of evaporation from any cause is distinctly 
beneficial, but the rainfall need not necessarily be such an 
enemy as most modern drainage schemes seem to imply. 
Floods always have been, and probably always will recur 
at times. The truth of the first of these propositions is 
evident from the great lateral extension of the river gravel, or 
alluvium, or both in most river valleys; and of the second 
from the inability to provide means whereby the drainage of a 
large area may be made to pass sufficiently fast into the 
porous beds underlying a much more limited one, when the 
rainfall is heavy ; or be discharged sufficiently fast by the 
ordinary bed of the stream. 
Rainfall does serve many useful purposes; it washes the 
atmosphere, feeds rivers and lakes, sinks into the ground and 
forms springs, flushes drains, and generally cleanses towns, 
but when it gets into situations where it can and does do 
damage, it is too often permitted to do it without exacting 
any equivalent of useful work from it. This arises partly 
from two sets of persons not acting together; some people 
want water, others want to get rid of it, by mutual agreement 
they might both be more completely satisfied. 
Mr. De Ranee estimates that there is an area of 26,633 
square miles of superficial permeable rock in this country, and 
19,308 square miles of impermeable with permeable under¬ 
neath, and he has suggested that the latter area should be fed 
by means of dumb-wells , both to prevent devastating floods and 
yield water. 
I would suggest that where permeable beds can be supplied 
in the manner I have proposed, that is by the intermediation 
of any superficial beds of gravel or sand—the river gravel or 
drift for instance—that would be the better plan. The supply 
of deep-seated water, from a given drainage area, would be 
much greater than if the outcrop of the water-bearing bed had 
been enlarged to an equal extent, and left as we now usually 
find it, covered with soil, and perhaps with provision for 
surface or under-draining. Further, innumerable small 
sources of water might be made available, and preserved 
as it can never be in open reservoirs, and this at less cost than 
by any other system. 
