tension of the observations to wilder districts would increase this figure, and that not in this province alone. But with that minimum area, and minimum depth of rain, 18,577 milliards of metric tons of water annually fall over the district drained by the Humber. Four millions of souls inhabit it. One and a quarter per cent. of the rainfall above estimated is all that is requisite to provide amply for such a population, including, as the district does, so many main centres of industry.

The fourth great natural engineering province of England mainly consists of land differing very widely in its conditions from those of the main districts of the previously indicated provinces. It comprises the large area, provisionally estimated at 6,000 square miles, drained by the Witham, the Welland, the Nen, the Great or Southern Ouse, the Stour, and the Blackwater, The water shed is hedged in by cretaceous, oolitic, and liassic hills, but a large part of the area of the basins is covered with alluvial deposit. As far as England is concerned, this great Fen district is the cradle of the engineer. Nowhere has he been so early taught to hold his own against that most powerful enemy of lowland-dwelling men, the sea. Nowhere have more bold, careful, provident, successful works been carried out by the engineers of England. The neglect which, as a general rule, makes our rivercourses the haunts of ague and the nurseries of reeds and rushes, instead of presenting fat, solid, rich meadowland, bearing at least three heavy annual crops, has been banished from the Fen country by sheer ne. cessity. Watermills are, happily, impossible in channels of which the fall is sometimes not more than four inches in a mile Care to keep clear and open the water-courses, and to bank in the outlying districts from the sea, has been es

sential in order to keep the crops from flood. Not only has the wind that rushes over the wide level area of the fens been used as the motive power for the corn-miller-water power being denied to his need— but the same agency has been applied to the purposes of drainage. Long lines of windmills display a steady and solemn industry to the traveller by fen and broad, working, as long as the wind is sufficient to turn their sails, with steady energy, in the ceaseless task of daily and nightly pumping. Our most famous engineers have left their names inscribed in large letters on the great works of the Fen districts. Their care has not been so much the supply, as the discharge of water; and the counteraction of that powerful tendency which all river outfalls display to raise and choke their own channels. The rainfall of the Fen district averages 29'11 inches in the year. The population is about two millions of souls. The annual waterfall is 11,178 milliards of metric tons. The people do not require one per cent. of the amount to supply their entire domestic need.

It would exhaust the space now available to continue to give such an account as personal reminiscence would enable the writer to offer of the remainder of the ten natural hydrological provinces of England. In brief they are as follows:-No. 5 is the outfall district of the Test, the Avon, and the Stour, comparatively short streams, with a southward flow through neocomian, cretaceous, and tertiary strata, draining a watershed of 5,500 square miles, over which the average rainfall is taken at 2456 inches. Not onehalf per cent. of this is required for the use of a million and a half of inhabitants. The Exe and the Tawe are the principal rivers of the sixth natural province, averaging an area of of 7,500 square miles, and including a population

of two millions of souls. The rainfall is 33.73 inches, one per cent. of which forms an ample supply for the population. In this romantic portion of the island we arrive at the ancient formations of the Millstone Grit and the Devonian sandstones, backed by the grandeur of the granite range of Dartmoor.

Northward and eastward of the Cornwall and Devon district stretches the second in magnitude of all the natural hydrological provinces of England, the large area of 8,000 square miles which is drained by the Severn in its 180 miles of course, and by its affluents, the Wye and the two Avons. The rainfall of the district is 33'97 inches; an amount which more frequent observations on the cradles of the great Welsh rivers would no doubt raise to a much higher figure. The population does not exceed three millions, and their demand on the water supply would be met by four-fifths of one per cent. of the rainfall. Almost every geological formation in England contributes water to the Severn. Almost every production of nature indigenous to the island enriches its fertile district. The source of the Warwickshire Avon, the river that washes the birthplace of Shakespeare, lies much farther to the east than the head of the Shropshire tributaries of the Trent. Severn itself, from its lofty mountain cradle on the eastern slope of Plinlimmon, makes a circuit round three parts of the compass, dividing the romantic scenery of the Silurian and Devonian rocks from the rich slopes of the poicilitic and liassic formations. Every branch of engineering, as well as of agriculture, may be studied in the province of the Severn. The survey of this province as a whole is an indispensable requisite to a comprehension of the hydrography of England.

Usk and Towy are the two principal effluents from 7,500 square

VOL. XVIII.-NO. CHI. NEW SERIES.

miles of country westward of the watershed of the Severn, over which there is a rainfall of 46′15 inches. Of this supply two millions of inhabitants require less than onehalf per cent. The mountain limestone, the coal measures, the old red sandstone, and the vast beds of the Cambrian rocks, pierced and capped by basalts, serpentine, and granite, form the main features of scenery which, in some parts of the principality, equal in romantic beauty any portions of Europe. Though mining industry has at once enriched and disfigured vast portions of this wild western country, and poisoned some of the streams, the salmon still makes his annual pilgrimage up and down many of the Welsh rivers. And on the Towy may be seen at the present day coracles which retain unaltered the form which they had in the days of the invasion of the island by Cæsar.

Lastly, a small but important district, comprising 3,000 square miles, and containing 3,000,000 people, is chiefly drained by the Dee and the Mersey. The rainfall here is 38.74 inches; two per cent. of which is required for the wants of the teeming centres of Lancashire industry. The coal measures and the poicilitic beds form the eastern portion of a province which adds rock salt to its other sources of wealth. On the west, the Dee runs in a course of 93 miles from its cradle under the granitic nucleus of Cader Idris. If the Severn drains the chief seats of the agricultural wealth of England, the Mersey provides the outlet for the districts most active in mining, manufacturing, and (with the sole exception of the metropolis) commercial industry. Each of these great provinces has a separate and distinct hydrological idiosyncrasy. Each needs its special and complete hydrological survey.

Very far as the above rough and hurried notes must be from the

ultimate result of the tabulated facts which it is the object of the hydrological surveyor to collect, they may yet, it is hoped, prove useful as affording a statement of the main domestic problem which England has now to solve. That problem, it is not too much to say, has never hitherto been looked fairly in the face. The time has come for so doing. That it is to be solved, and can be solved, only in one way, no competent judge will care to deny. That more mischief than good is likely to result from any partial and independent works affecting collection, diversion, or outfall of water, in any river basin of which the hydrology has not been studied, is but too evident. For this survey not only is the ground cleared, but a very important portion of the materials are ready to hand. The admirable Ordnance map of England affords that topographical basis which the Italian hydraulic engineers had themselves to provide for their work. The hypsometry, or altimetric details, are also attainable from the same source. The geological data

are published, or in course of preparation, under the charge of that useful department which was formerly under the direction of Murchison. What is now required is the co-ordination of meteoric and hydrological observations with the previously indicated elements of knowledge. The actual rainfall, watershed by watershed; the volumetric flow of every river, maximum, minimum, and annual; the evaporation from different soils; the percolation through porous strata; the aerial, sub-aerial, and subterranean course which is taken by every portion of the rainfall of England, from the backbone of the island to the sea; such are the facts that we now require to know. It can hardly be thought that we need the example of Italian engineers to stimulate our own men of science. But the fact that Italy has so rapidly advanced in the provident collection of necessary information, where we have as yet to take the preliminary steps, is one that is not altogether in harmony with our tacit claim to rank as the first engineering people in the world.

PART II.

RESCIMBENI'S glorious reign ended soon after the donation of the Bosco Parrasio and the coronation of Perfetti, and the Arcadians of Rome and of the colonies lamented in innumerable sonnets and elegies the veteran founder and champion of the Academy. The raised seat beneath the laurels of the Bosco Parrasio, left vacant by the death of Crescimbeni, was filled by his friend and colleague the Abate Lorenzini. He had been educated as a servant in the house of the poet Guidi, and had early acquired a literary position, though less by his works, which cannot now be found, than by his familiarity with writers, having contrived to keep on good terms both with Crescimbeni and with Gravina. He was a large, raw boned man, with a face at once sarcastic and goodhumoured, and strange, humorous, astonished-looking eyebrows. He had probably more talent than Crescimbeni; at all events a much juster appreciation of men and things, and a tendency to regard Arcadian affairs as not so very much more important than other human concerns.

The accession of the second Custode Generale marks a new phase in the history of the Academy; during his government Arcadia extended its frontiers to the utmost, and became supreme throughout the peninsula; but, like Rome and Venice, it did so at the expense of its original spirit and constitution. The Academy became lost in its legions of members, and as people of every sort, and in every part of Italy, became Arcadians, to be an Arcadian soon meant merely to be

a member of the society of one's native town, and a holder of one's own principles, just as one would have been had Arcadia never existed. In short, Arcadia ceased to be an academy and became the whole literary and social life of the country.

And now let us stop and glance round the Italy of the eighteenth century, a century displaying in all countries so strange a mixture of strength and of weakness, of vigorous modes of thought which had not the force of habit and of lazy modes of life which were enforced by custom; of philanthropical aspirations and tyrannical institutions; of goodness masked by frivolity and scepticism, and villany hidden beneath solemnity and moralising; of corruption and renovation, mingling and fermenting in unlovely fashion. In Italy this movement was less strongly felt than in other countries, and especially less than in France, and not only because the race was less prone to exaggeration and excess. In Italy there was, of course, a great deal to sweep away-vicious modes of thought and life due to long inertion and protracted rule of Spaniards, Jesuits, and little local tyrants; but, on the other hand, there still remained much of the influence of the Renaissance. The Italians were not the great-grandsons of semibarbarians, like the Germans and ourselves, but of free, enlightened, and polished burghers; they had the remembrance of commercial commonwealths, and not, like the French, of a hideous feudal system; there was no inequality of classes, no great misery and great power opposed to each other for centuries; and when the stream of progress of the eighteenth century reached Italy, it joined insensibly

with the remains of civilisation left in the country by antiquity and the Renaissance, and of which no amount of political and social disorganisation could ever deprive it. The eighteenth century in Italy was, therefore, not a violent reaction against feudalism as in France, nor against Puritanism as in England, nor against foreign domination as in Germany; it was a mere gradual waking up from lethargy and a shaking off of its bad effects. There was no war against nobles, or priests, or foreigners, and thence it is that Italy in that time seems scarcely to move in comparison with other countries, and its very movement, when examined, appears rather droll than revolting in the contrasts it brings to light.

Let us pass by the four great towns most visited by the travellers of the eighteenth century: Venice, crumbling gaily away, a place where Beckford could dream Oriental dreams of luxuriousness and hidden terrors, and compare the motley population, not less than the cupolas and minarets, to the strange world of Vathek which he carried in his mind. Naples, feudal and antique, at once so backward in social institutions and so happy in natural endowments, which could make Goethe feel even more of a Greek than he naturally was-Naples, which from amongst intellectual and physical filth gave Italy in the eighteenth century her philosophy and her art, her Vico and her Pergolesi, her Filangieri and her Cimarosa. Florence, with her Frenchified rulers and intensely Italian people, painted in all her frivolity by the frivolous Mann. And Rome, of whose uneducated princes and half-barbarous lower classes the President de Brosses speaks like an earlier and less eccentric Stendhal. Let us leave the great centres, each repre

the

senting some extreme, of artificially produced vice, of artificially kept up barbarism, of artificial credulity, and artificial pedantry, and let us look at one of the innumerable smaller cities which attest vigour of the Italian spirit of earlier days, a vigour which foreign interference or foreign pressure has succeeded neither in entirely extinguishing nor in entirely warping. In these quiet medieval towns, where crumbling monuments overshadow grass-grown streets, and only a few heavy gilt coaches rumble across the time-worn pavement, where the popular vitality is concentrated in the market-place, the barbers' shops, and the coffeehouses, intellectual life sputters and crackles cheerily. The noble counts and marquises, descended from republican merchants, feudal princes, or mercenary generals, mix freely with the upper middle classes, their equals in race, in education, in manners, and very nearly in fortune, and who feel neither jealous. nor idolatrous of their superiors in rank. The dull, serene life of these inglorious grandees and placid burghers is wiled away in the cultivation of science and erudition, literature and art; nobles and commoners meet on equal footing; they study together in the same colleges, where the master may be a patrician general like Marsigli, or a plebeian professor like Zanotti; they help each other in editing inscriptions, publishing chronicles, and compiling guide-books and histories; they make each other presents of their materials, or lampoon each other most frightfully. The women are not left out of the literary bustle; of course there are some who have been brought up by pious nuns who could not or would not teach them reading or writing, as there are young men after Parini's model