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appears that the raising of the lower level was obtained by stopping, at a fixed hour, and for a considerable time together, the apertures established along the length of the canal for purposes of irrigation. Amoretti, speaking of the machinery for regulating the issue at these apertures, uses the surgical word otturamento, a styptic application. It is probable that these issues, and that by which the canals were connected, were of the simple and clumsy construction still used in China-bars of wood resting on one another in two vertical grooves of masonry, and elevated in succession as occasion requires. For these the improvement of a sliding flood-gate was in time substituted, which is said to have been borrowed from our masters in the art of military engineering, the Turks.

But none perhaps of the Italian writers who have discussed these matters had better opportunities of investigating the Milanese archives, or took more pains to do so with reference to the works of Viscont, than Fu magalli. The following passage from his book on the antiquities of Milan (1792) will show that his inquiries left him a warm, though not an unreasonable or uncompromising advocate of the claims of Lionardo-if not to the absolute invention, at least to the practical application of the lock to purposes of inland navigation:

conti, is rather vague,- Meditatus est et aquæ rivum, per quem ab Abiate Vighianum usque sursum veheretur, aquis altiora scandentibus machinarum arte quas conchas appellant.' Visconti did, however, more than meditate some contrivance by which a communication was effected between two canals of a different level. Much information on these works of Visconti is to be found in the preface to Lionardo's 'Trattato della Pittura,' by Carlo Amoretti, librarian to the Ambrosian Library, Milan, 1804. A canal of irrigation, derived from the Ticino, had, it appears, been commenced by the Milanese so far back as 1179. This canal was then only carried from Abiate on the Ticino, as far as Gagiano, about half the distance to Milan. In 1227, it was prolonged to Milan; and was probably then first converted to purposes of navigation, for the various streams which traversed or flowed near the city were then directed into it; and in 1296 a project was conceived of uniting it with the Lambro, and through that river with the Po, which, however, was not then executed. In 1438, one of those incidental stimuli was applied to the ingenuity of the Milanese engineers which so often lead to unforeseen consequences. The construction of St. Peter's indirectly assisted the Reformation;-that of the Duomo of Milan led to some step in advance in hydraulics, which, if not amounting to the double-gated lock, 'For the rest, in asserting for Lionardo the was shortly followed by that invention. It boast of the invention of the conca, we do not was to overcome the difficulty of conveying pretend that it was entirely his own, or that it the inaterials for the Duomo, furnished from issued an entire novelty from his brain. We know for certain that before his time other conche the Alpine quarries of Candoglia, that some and sostegni, and the like contrivances, had been contrivance became necessary for lifting vesconstructed on rivers and canals, and specially sels from one level to another. The Ticino on our own. We have seen above, that at Viand the canal had brought the marble to the arena a conca had served since the year 1439 to suburbs of the city, but there it remained, facilitate the passage of barges from the great till the ditch of the city, having been ren- canal to the ditch of the city, in which latter there dered navigable, but at a higher level, certain was also a second conca near the suburb of the conche were devised for passing the vessels Porta Vercellina. The existence of other conche by an alternate increase and decrease of the in the little canal near the Benaglio, in the year 1471, is apparent from a despatch of that year water. Pro faciendo crescere et decrescere of the magistracy, one of which conche was probaquam.' These are the words used in an ac-ably the one at the spot called Gorla, which, in count of the expenses of the work existing in a decree of 1533, Francis Sforza the Second orthe archives of Milan. One of these, the dered to be removed, probably as having been Conca di Viarena, constructed in 1439, raised rendered useless by the construction, in 1496, of vessels to a height of four Italian braccie. the one situated at the Cassina de' Pomi. If, in We think these facts and dates make Visconti Lionardo's object was to delineate that alone the designs of conche in the Ambrosian MSS., and his engineers formidable rivals to Zen- which was of his own invention, in such case we drini's brothers of Viterbo; but, in the ab- should have to attribute to him three particularsence of any design or other certain descrip-ities at once among the most beautiful and the tion of the conca of this period, we still doubt most singular, inasmuch as all three are discernwhether it can be classed with the pound-lock, ible, slightly sketched by his hand. The first is or was, in fact, much more than the applica- that of the gates turning on hinges, for the purtion of the sostegno-long used in rivers-to effect a junction between two artificial lines of navigation under circumstances which gave a considerable command of water. It

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pose of the more easily opening and shutting. The second is the closing of the same at an obtuse angle, the construction best adapted to sustain the pressure of the water, and for management against a current. The third has reference

to the little doors or sluices in the gates for the rapid filling or emptying of the conca. And the fashion so sketched by Lionardo is the one since practised in the rest of Italy, in Holland, and in France, in the formation of conche on rivers and canals, all posterior in date to ours.'*

Our readers will hardly fail to observe that in a passage which we have quoted from Frisi, there is distinct mention of hinges in the case of the sostegno constructed at Stra by the brothers of Viterbo. We have also to remark that the term sostegni a gradino, as used by the advocates of Lionardo, must be taken to imply merely a system of locks applied at various distances to the same canal, but not in immediate connexion, like those of the Bridgewater canal at Runcorn, or those of Mr. Telford at the western termination of the Caledonian. Frisi is distinct on this point.

give their respective expression to the countenances of our Lord and his betrayer, and trace the intricacies of wheel-work and the perspective of machinery-with the second could all but anticipate in an age of compara tive darkness, the discoveries of Copernicus, Newton, and Cuvier. Those who think these terms exaggerated may refer to the pages of Mr. Hallam's History of Literature' for the confirmation of such part of our eulogy as is not to be found in the MS. folio of the Ambrosian library, or on the wall of the Dominican refectory. It is strange that in such a city as Paris the works of such a man should be allowed to remain unprinted and unedited. A Vinci Society at Paris would be a worthy rival to our Bannatyne, Shakspeare, Camden, Spalding, et hoc genus omne in Britain.

Lionardo's work, which still exists, was inAbove all,' he says, 'that invention deserves spected as a model in 1660 by F. Andreossi, to be known in Italy which unites together differ- for whom the honor has been claimed by his ent sostegni, so as to effect an immediate pas- descendants of the scheme for the great casage from one to the other. With us the sostegni nal of Languedoc. It is rather remarkable are all isolated, and separated one from the oth- that so early a work should so long have er by a portion of the canal. In France, in Swe-maintained so high a reputation in such a den, in Flanders, and in other countries, where- school of hydraulic art as Northern Italy. It ever it is necessary to partition off a considera- is perhaps to be accounted for by the circumble full in a tract of no great extent, the sostegni a gradino are constructed in such a manner that the descent takes place immediately out of one into the other, and thus the intervening gates belong equally to the two contiguous chambers.'

Frisi, who had seen the works of Brindley at Runcorn, might have added, that it would be the object and boast of an engineer so to construct his canal as to force together as much as possible in this manner the lockage which it required. The uninterrupted level of the Bridgewater canal from Leigh and Manchester to Runcorn, and the concentration of its descent to the Mersey at the latter place, have always been considered as among the most striking evidences of the genius and skill of Brindley.

stance that the territorial divisions of the district so copiously watered from the Alps and Apennines, presented political obstacles to continuous lines of artificial navigation: hence the skill of the engineer was rather directed to purposes of drainage, irrigation, and security, to tame the torrent's thundershock,' or fertilize the marsh, than to make the best of friends and the worst of enemies (as the Duke of Bridgewater was wont to call water) subservient to purely commercial pur

poses.

For the claim of Holland to priority in the application of the lock, we refer our readers to the article on Inland Navigation in Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopædia,' attributed to the authorship of Messrs. Telford and From all these disquisitions we are led to Nimmo. Their researches led them to the infer that some doubt exists whether the conclusion that the invention was known ir brothers of Viterbo really effected any material Holland at least a century before its applic improvement in certain clumsy contrivances tion in Italy. With the utmost deference for which existed in Italy in the fourteenth cen- these two eminent names, we are yet inclintury, perhaps even so far back as the twelfth. ed to doubt whether the instances they quote One fact only seems certain, that the first ap-in support of this position are sufficient to esplication of a series of locks by which water tablish it. and what it floats is made to walk up and as A. D. 1253, by William Count of Holland, The placeat granted so far back down stairs, was the work of that master- to the city of Haerlem, for the construction mind which for variety of accomplishment of certain sluices at Spaarendam, ordaining has no equal perhaps in the records of human transmeatum quemdam aquarum qui Spoya genius and acquirement-of one who had the vulgariter appellatur, vel foramen. hand of Apellas and the head of Archimedes quod majores naves cum suis oneribus possint -who with the first could with equal felicity de facili pertransire in Dampuo apud Spar*Delle Antichità Longobardico-Milanesi, tom. nam,' is, we think, inconclusive, and we ii. p. 126. doubt whether either this or the other exam

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have long existed, each 182 feet in length and 39 feet wide. They were constructed about the year 1600, in the reign of Charles IX., by Dutch engineers, probably under the direction of John of Ostrogotha, who had travelled much and seen such inventions. He died in 1618.'

only carried out the original plan, the credit due to the sovereign and the minister of having set an early example in the improvement of inland intercourse remains unaffected. That example produced brilliant consequences in the reign of Louis XIV. The Canal of Orleans, begun in 1632 and finished in 1692, saved eighteen leagues of difficult and precarious river navigation between Orleans and Briare. The Canal de Loing, finished in 1724, completed the junction of these two canals with the Seine.

ples quoted of Dutch works anterior to the fifteenth century establish any thing further than the application of some form of the early sostegno or single-sluice, more or less improved. We consider, however, that the conclusions of such writers make this branch of the subject well worthy of further investigation. It is not in our judgment at all improb- The first locks constructed in France, it is able that in an age when ideas travelled supposed, were the seven adjacent locks at more slowly and precariously than at present, Rogny, on the Canal de Briare, commenced the engineers of the two countries may have by Henry IV. in 1695, and conducted during worked in complete independence each of the the five following years of his reign under the other. The artificial navigation of Italy was superintendence of Sully. The work was doubtless more exclusively of an inland char-interrupted by the assassination of Henry, acter, and the invention of the Dutch had the and not resumed till 1638. As, however, the additional stimulus of the natural circumstan-main difficulties of the line were dealt with ces which lead to the necessity of the tidal-under his reign, and as its completion in 1642 sluice and lock-gate in its various forms. In Mr. Prescott's notice of the canal constructed by Cortez in 1521, for the military purpose of conveying his brigantines from Tezcuco to the neighboring lake, we find mention of dams and locks. As indeed the distance was half a league, and as the operation appears to have been that of rendering a mere brook or ravine (fossata) navigable for vessels of some burthen, it would be difficult to conceive how some such contrivances could have been dispensed with; but we have to regret that among the extracts cited in Mr. Further south meanwhile the power and Prescott's notes from Spanish authorities, enterprise of Louis had been displaying itthere is no passage which describes them. self on a far greater scale. The Canal of (See History of the Conquest of Mexico,' Languedoc, begun in 1667 and finished in vol. iii. p. 78.) The description of the work 1631, had realized a project which for centuby Cortez himself in his third relation, ad-ries had inspired the fancy of the greatest dressed to Charles V., does not condescend to many particulars, but he gives the depth by the rough measurement of the human stature, quanto saria la statura di due homini.' (Ramusio, vol. iii. p. 266.) The countrymen of Cortez in Old Spain have achieved but little in this line. The canals of Aragon and Segovia are their only works of any consequence, and both are unfinished. former, commenced by Charles V. in 1529, but remodelled and extended in the latter part of the last century, is described by a recent traveller, Captain S. Cook, R. N., as presenting an unnecessary width of surface to the sun, a great mistake in a warm climate, and as more used for irrigation than traffic. The aqueduct by which it crosses the valley of the We are ill qualified to decide on the merits Rio Zabon is said to be a magnificent work of a controversy which still has its warm and of the kind, and to have cost about 130,000l.enlightened partisans on either side in France. Should Spain ever enjoy the advantage of a It is more to our purpose-that of noting a government, its attention might be usefully directed to effecting the junction of the two seas by the extension of this canal from Tudela to some point on the coast of Biscay.

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Of two locks in Sweden, Mr. Telford says, ' near Wenernsborg two connected locks

rulers of France-Charlemagne, Francis I, and Richelieu-the junction of the ocean with the Mediterranean. For any detailed description of this undertaking we must content ourselves with referring our readers to the numerous works extant and accessible on the subject, such as those of De la Lande, the Chevalier Allent, and General Andreossi. The latter author sets forth the evidence on which he founds the claim of his ancestor, F. Andreossi, as the original inventor of the plan which he certainly assisted to execute, to the exclusion of the pretensions of Riquet, as asserted in an inscription on the lock of Toulouse, and admitted for many years without question.

few leading facts and features of the rise and progress of inland navigation-to call attention to its relative state at this period in England. We are indebted to Mr. Hughes for a quotation inserted in his interesting Memoir of James Brindley,' which bears

upon this subject. It is from a work of one Francis Mathew, who, in the year 1656, addressed the Protector Cromwell on the advantage of a water communication between London and Bristol :

'Mathew in his day,' says Mr. Hughes, 'was probably considered a bold and daring speculator; and what was the extent of the plan by which he proposed to effect his object? It was this: to make the rivers Isis and Avon navigable to their sources by means of sasses, and to connect their heads by a short canal of three miles, across the intervening ridge of country. It is amusing enough to follow the argument of this primitive amateur, for he ventures not to call himself an engineer, in his endeavor to convince the world that his project, novel and gigantic as he admits it to be, is not beyond the capacity of the state to execute. As for private enterprise, whether by individuals or by a corporation, he considers it quite out of the question for such a work; but he ventures to think that the state might execute it with a reasonable prospect of success.

'The condition,' says Mr. Hughes,' of engineering science in the time of Mathew may be inferred from the following extract from his book, relating to the general subject of inland navigation. He recommends

"To rise as high, in opening the said rivers, as they shall be found feazible, there to make a wharf, magazine, or warehouse, for all such commodities as are useful to those parts of the country, both for trade and merchandizing, and service in time of war with far greater expedition. If any other river, practicable for boats, lye near the head or side of the said river, and that the ground favor the opening of a still river to be drawn between them, then to joyn them with sasses or otherwise. But should the ground be repugnant, then a fair stone causey, not exceeding one little day's journey for horses or carts, to be raised between the said rivers. By the like industry many mediterranean passages by water, with the help of such causeys, would be formed from one sea to the other, and not to have the old channel of any river to be forsaken for a shorter passage; for, as hath been said, rivers are never out of their way."

dealing with elevations and volumes of water from which Mathew would have shrunk in dismay. It is perhaps strange that Louis XIV.'s grandiloquent and characteristic proclamation, which made so many French bosoms beat high, should have had no echo in England. It is, however, far stranger that the example of the great work, accomplished in 1681, with its 100 locks, its 36 aqueducts, and its elevation of some 600 feet above the level of the Mediterranean, should for eighty years have been lost upon England; and that when the hour and the man at last arrived, a scheme more substantial, but far less gigantic, should have been treated as the dream of a madman. We cannot even find that the Canal of Languedoc was ever cited by Brindley or his employer in reply to the wise men who questioned their sanity. It is true that the Canal of Languedoc affords no example of a navigable aqueduct, the piers of which stand in the bed of a navigable river, and constructed on a scale which leaves the navigation of that river unimpeded; but even the Pont du Gard might have sufficed to strip Brindley's project of the Barton Aqueduct of its supposed impracticability. If Brindley, however, was acquainted with the existence ly so ignorant of their details as to be utterly of such works at this period, he was assuredinnocent of plagiarism. With regard to the Duke of Bridgewater himself there is more room for doubt. He certainly visited France and Italy in his youth; and hence Mr. Hughes, while defending zealously, and we think most justly, his claim as the originator of navigable canals in England, infers that' doubtedly he had seen and studied the great canal works of Italy, Holland, and other countries.' The question is one of more curiosity than importance, but there is at least no proof of the truth of the assumption.

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The history of Francis Duke of Bridgewater is engraved in intaglio on the face of the country he helped to civilize and enrich.— His memory is held in veneration in his own country, and beyond it; and, we may add, in It is hardly fair to look down from the affection as well as respect by the population height of modern achievement with contempt of his own Lancashire neighborhood, a race on a man who, at all events, did his best to zealous in its attachments, and not indisposed call public attention to a neglected subject. to what Mr. Carlyle calls 'hero worship.' The Had Mathew succeeded in fixing upon it the best records of an eminent man are certainvigorous mind of the Protector, his feeble ly his works. The 'Principia' and the 'Transsuggestion might have fructified, and Bridge-figuration' are more substantial memorials of water and Brindley might have been anticipat- Newton and Raphael than the pages of any ed by a century. It is true that while such biographer; but yet few are altogether indifa representative of the engineering science ferent to even the pettiest minutiae of the of England was addressing the English lives and the habits of such men. We love Government, Colbert, Riquet, and Andreos- to hear of Newton's untasted and forgotten si were digesting the scheme for the junction dinner, and to trace in Vasari Raphael's of the Atlantic with the Mediterranean, and morning progress to the Vatican surrounded

by enthusiastic pupils. In this instance our tween an accomplished and matured man and curiosity for such details has been but slen- a backward and unruly boy did not fail to derly gratified. Correspondence to ransack, show themselves, and evidence exists that there is none. It is not strictly true to say, Wood often wished himself back in the desert as has been said, that Brindley could not he had so lately left. His work on Palmyra, write; but it is true to say of his employer which was published immediately after his rethat he would not; he had at least an aver-turn from the East, bears date 1752, and in sion to the use of the pen. We know not March of the following year he started with that, with the exception of meagre articles in his pupil. To a man so gifted his new comforeign works, any one has attempted to dis-panion must have been a bad exchange for charge for the Duke the task of biography; Bouverie and Dawkins: and who ever yet which in the case of Brindley has been more felt the luxuries of European travelling a comthan once performed.* These remarks are pensation for the delights of the desert?no preface to any such deliberate attempt of Wood, indeed, was no college pedagogue, but ours; yet a few scattered notices of so re-a man of the world-of that world which acmarkable a benefactor to his country may be knowledges a Chesterfield as its guide in worth collection and admission into these morals as well as behavior. He was induced pages::-' - His saltem accumulem donis.' with some difficulty to persevere in his underFrancis, sixth Earl and third and last Duke taking. It is probable that during their resiof Bridgewater, was born in 1736, the young-dence in Italy he may have communicated to est of five children. His father died when his pupil some taste for the arts, which afterhe was eleven years old; and one only of the wards displayed itself in the formation of the four elder brothers had lived to enjoy for a Bridgewater Gallery. He sat for his portrait short time the title. On the death of this bro- to Mengs, probably by the duke's desire, for ther, Francis succeeded to the dukedom.the picture is now in the Bridgewater collecThough the loss of a mother, usually a far tion. The duke made also some purchases greater misfortune than that of a father, was spared him, it is said that he met with little attention from one whose affections in the first year of her widowhood were transferred to a second husband. It is certain that his education was much neglected; and we have heard that some attempt was contemplated to set him altogether aside on the score of mental deficiency. Horace Walpole writes to his Florentine Pylades, Sir Horace Mann, in 1761, -'You will be happy in Sir Richard Lyttleton and his duchess-they are the best humoured people in the world.' We have reason to believe that little of this valuable quality was dispensed to the benefit of the sickly boy, who probably gave little promise of long surviving his consumptive brothers, and less of future eminence in any department. The We have little record of the duke's habits field of exertion which he lived to select could between the period of his journey and the athardly be foreseen by wiser people than his tainment of his majority. The Racing Calworldly relatives. His guardians, the Duke of endar bears witness that from 1756 to 1770 Bedford, and his brother-in-law, Lord Tren- he kept race-horses. He had also for some tham, sent him at the age of seventeen to make time a house at Newmarket. The bulky man the tour of Europe. They selected for his of after years was once so light and slender companion a man of the highest distinction of frame that he occasionally rode races in for talent and acquirement, the scholar, the person; and on one such occasion we have traveller, and the antiquarian, Robert Wood, heard a bet was jokingly proposed that he author of the well-known works on Troy, would be blown off his horse. He rode a race Baalbeck, and Palmyra. The usual conse- in Trentham park against a jockey of royal quences of this Mezentian connection be-blood, the Duke of Cumberland. Whatever were his pursuits, or the degree to which he indulged in them, they soon merged into the one occupation of his remaining life.

*The notices of the duke in those two valuable

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works, the French Biographie Universelle' and the German Conversations Lexicon,' have antedated his birth by ten years.

of marbles, tables of Egyptian granite, such as still tempt English purses in the shops of the Roman scarpellini. These, however, remained in their original packing-cases till after his death. We much regret that we have been unable to find any trace of the duke's route beyond Lyons, except his visit to Rome. It is possible that the works of Lionardo on the Milan canal may have engaged his attention; and equally so that, on his return homeward, he may have taken a route through the south of France, which, at Narbonne, Toulouse, or elsewhere, may have brought the greater works of Louis XIV under his observation; but we have nothing but conjecture to guide us, and we have no reason to believe that he passed through any part of Holland.

It will sometimes happen, as Dryden tells

us,

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