PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION. 
5 
on the same point: “ As the expedition of the Argonauts to Col¬ 
chis opened the way to the east, so the voyage of Colams of 
Samos, who sailed for Egypt, but was driven by easterly storms, 
‘not without divine direction,’ says Herodotus, beyond the Pillars 
of Hercules, into the ocean.” And thus the commerce of the 
Greeks was extended to the “ Elysian Fields ” and the Hesperides 
by the accident of uncontrolled circumstance. 
Cromwell is credited with bringing the commercial conflict be¬ 
tween Holland and Great Britain to a favorable crisis for the lat¬ 
ter by his sagacious navigation laws, which have ever since 
crowned England as the dictator of European and Asiatic com¬ 
merce. 
Necessity is said to be the parent of invention, and this parent 
begot the channels of irrigation, in the mediaeval ages, intended 
only to diffuse the waters of rivers over arid plains, to stimulate 
agricultural production. As these ditches were filled with water, 
the idea suggested itself, without the cost of invention, that boats 
would float on these artificial channels as well as upon natural 
water courses, and often much better, since Art was compelled to 
follow the plane of water level to the points of distribution, where¬ 
as Nature followed inclined planes, often interposing obstructions, 
either in shoaly depths or otherwise. These conduits were first 
only intended for irrigation, but were subsequently used to float 
boats laden with the trophies of art and commerce, and this long 
before the Christian era. Herodotus and Pliny both mention nav- 
gable canals in Asia Minor and Liguria. The latter describes the 
canal excavated by Drusus, in the reign of Augustus, from the 
Rhine to the Yssel, making a new exit from that river to the sea. 
Xerxes is said to have constructed a canal across the low isthmus 
of Athos, and sundry attempts by the Greeks, and afterwards by 
the Roman emperors, to connect the Ionian sea with the Archi¬ 
pelago, via the isthmus of Corinth.” 
It has been the amazement of all civilization, since the world 
has had an introduction into interior China, how that people, so 
homogeneous, and by habit so unobservant of the virtue of clean¬ 
liness and the laws of health, have managed to avoid sweeping 
and decimating scourges for so many centuries, while massed in 
such vast numbers, more dense than the most populous rural dis- 
