CANAL

(Lat.) An artificial channel filled with water, formed for the purposes of draining, of irrigation, of supplying towns with water, or of inland navigation. Illustrative of the first, may be cited the canal which extends from the Fucine Lake (now Lake Celano) into the river Liri; of the second, the canals with which ancient Egypt was intersected; of the third, the artificial aqueducts of antiquity, or in modern times the New River, by which London is in a great measure supplied with water from Hertfordshire; but it is to channels for the purpose of inland navigation that the term canal is usually confined. That the importance of canals as a means of inland navigation attracted attention even in the earliest ages, is manifest from the " fo ae Phi list i nae," large canals {Pliny, iii. 16.) at the south of the Eridanus in Liguria, the origin of which is ascribed by Mr. Bryant to the Can a a nites, who at an early period migrated from Philistia; as well as from the grand design of the Cnidians, a people of Caria in Asia Minor, to dig a channel through the isthmus which joined their territory to the continent. {Her. ii. 78.) The attempt, too, of the Egyptians at a later period to unite the Nile with the Red Sea by a canal has been often recorded, though it is diflScult at the present day co discover the least traces of its existence. The Greeks, who received the first principles of commerce and the arts from the Egj^ptians and Phoenicians, and who, improving upon the models transmitted to them, afterwards reached an unexampled pitch of civilisation, conceived the magnificent design of making a navigable pa age from the Ionian Sea into the Archipelago, by cutting a canal acro the isthmus of Corinth. This undertaking, however, proved abortive; and though the attempt was again renewed by several of the Roman emperors, it still remained without succe . In the reign of August us, Drusus succeeded in excavating a canal from the Rhine to the I cl, and formed, as we are told by Pliny, a new mouth from the Rhine to the sea. A canal between the Rhine and the Maese, supposed to be that now' commencing at Leaden and pa mg Delft to its junction with the Maese at Sluys, was likewise formed by the Romans. But, as has been often observed, it was by bending nations under the same yoke, and not by uniting them in commercial ties, that the Romans sought to extend international communications; hence their canals were usually formed for the purposes of draining or of warfare. There can be little doubt, however, that it was the Romans who introduced into their provinces the models of internal communication which in modern times have undergone such immense improvement, and which have been converted to a purpose nobler than conquest — the interchange of the productions of labour. There is no country in the world where the advantages of canals are more appreciated than in China. From time immemorial the rivers that intersect that vast empire have been united by innumerable canals; and the Grand Canal is said to be the most stupendous work of the kind that has ever been executed. {Raynal, Hist. Phil. 1.102.) Ru ia, too, exhibits a remarkable degree of enterprise in the construction of canals for the [s. 199]