Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 13).djvu/23

 this character the Languedoc Canal, built by Riquet, from 1667 to 1881, was the most conspicuous. It connected the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean, its termini being Narbonne and Toulouse. It is one hundred and forty-eight miles in length and its summit level is six hundred feet above the sea, "while the works on its line embrace upwards of one hundred locks and fifty aqueducts, an undertaking which is a lasting monument of the skill and enterprise of its projectors; and with this work as a model it seems strange that Britain should not, till nearly a century after its execution, have been engaged in vigorously following so laudable an example."

The Romans had built two canals in England, the Caer Dyke and the Foss Dyke; of the former only the name remains. "Camden in his Britannia states that the Foss Dyke was a cut originally made by the Romans, probably for water supply or drainage, and that it was deepened and rendered in some measure navigable in the year 1121 by Henry I. In 1762 it was reported on by Smeaton and