his own plan. He was against carrying the
canal down into the Irwell by a flight of locks,
and so up again on the other side to the
proposed level, but counselled carrying the canal
by solid embankments and a stone aqueduct
right over the river upon one level throughout.
The duke accepted his opinion, and had plans
prepared for a new application to parliament,
Brindley often staying with him at work and in
consultation for weeks together, while still
travelling to and fro in full employment upon
mills, water-wheels, cranes, fire-engines, and
other mechanical work. Small as his pay was,
he lived frugally. He had by this time even
saved a little money, and gained credit enough
to be able, by borrowing from a friend at Leek,
to pay between five and six hundred pounds for
a fourth share of an estate at Turnhurst, in
Staffordshire, supposed by him to be full of
minerals.

The Duke of Bridgewater obtained his act in
the year seventeen 'sixty, but the bold and
original part of Brindley's scheme, which many
ridiculed as madness, caused the duke much
anxiety. In England there had never been so
great an aqueduct, but the scheme was not only
for the carrying of water in a water-tight trunk
of earth over an embankment, but also for the
carrying of ships on a bridge of water over
water. Brindley had no misgivings. To allay
the duke's fears, he suggested calling in and
questioning another engineer, who surprised the
man of genius by ending an adverse report thus:
"I have often heard of castles in the air; but
never before saw where any of them were to be
erected."

The duke, however, with all his hesitation, had
most faith in the head of James Brindley, bade
him go on in his own way, and resolved to run
the risk of failure. And so, on a bridge of three
arches, the canal was carried over the Irwell by
the Barton aqueduct, thirty-nine feet above
the river. The water was confined within a
puddled channel to prevent leakage, and the
work is at this day as sound as it was when first
constructed. For the safe carrying of water
along the top of an earthen embankment
Brindley had relied upon the retaining powers
of clay puddle. It was by help also of clay
puddle that he carried the weight of the
embankment safe over the ooze of Trafford Moss.

With great ingenuity, also, Brindley provided
for the crossing of his canal by streams
intercepting its course, without breach of his rule
that it is unsafe to let such waters freely mix
with the canal stream. Thus, to provide for the
free passage of the Medlock without causing a
rush into the canal, an ingenious form of weir
was contrived over which its waters flowed into
a lower level, and thence down a well several
yards deep, leading to a subterranean passage
by which the stream was passed into the Irwell,
near at hand. Arthur Young, who saw Brindley's
canal soon after it was opened, said that " the
whole plan of these works shows a capacity and
extent of mind which foresees difficulties, and
invents remedies in anticipation of possible evils.
The connexion and dependence of the parts upon
each other are happily imagined; and all are
exerted in concert, to command by every means
the wished-for success." At the Worsley end
Brindley constructed a basin, into which coal
was brought from different workings of the mine
by a subterranean water-channel. Brindley also
invented cranes for the more ready loading of
the boats, laid down within the mines a system
of underground railways leading from the face
of the coal where the miners worked to the
wells that he had made at different points in the
tunnels for shooting the coal down into the
boats waiting below. He drained and ventilated
with a water-bellows the lower parts of the
mine. He improved the barges, invented water-
weights, raising dams, riddles to wash the coal
for the forges. At the Manchester end Brindley
made equally ingenious arrangements for the
easy delivery of the coal at the top of Castle
Hill. At every turn in the work his inventive
genius was felt. When the want of lime for
the masonry was a serious impediment, Brindley
discovered how to make of a useless unadhesive
lime-marl, by tempering it and casting it in
moulds before burning, an excellent lime, a
contrivance that alone saved the duke several
thousand of pounds cost. When the water was
let in, and the works everywhere stood firm,
people of fashion flocked to see Brindley's
canal as "perhaps the greatest artificial
curiosity in the world;" and writers spoke in
glowing terms of the surprise with which they
saw several barges of great burthen drawn by
a single mule or horse along "a river hung in
the air," over another river flowing beneath.

As for Manchester, with the price of coal
reduced one half, it was ready to make the best
use of the steam-engine when it was established
as the motive power in our factories.

Within two months of the day, seventeenth
of July, seventeen 'sixty-one, when the first
boat-load of coals travelled over the Barton
viaduct, Brindley's notes testify that he was at
Liverpool " rocconitoring," and by the end of
September he was levelling for a proposed
extension of his canal from Manchester to Liverpool
by joining it to the Mersey eight miles
below Warrington Bridge, whence there is a
natural tideway to Liverpool, about fifteen
miles distant. At that time there was not even
a coach-communication over the bad roads
between Manchester and Liverpool, the first stage-
coach having been started six years later, when it
required six, and sometimes eight, horses to pull
it the thirty miles along the ruts and through
the sloughs. The coach started from Liverpool
early in the morning, breakfasted at Prescot,
dined at Warrington, and reached Manchester
by supper-time. From Manchester to Liverpool
it made the return journey next day. The Duke
of Bridgewater's proposed canal was strongly
opposed as an antagonist interest by the Mersey
and Irwell Navigation Company. The canal
promised to take freights at half the price charged
by the Navigation Company. A son of the
Earl of Derby took the part of the "Old