WATER AND WOOD.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume II, Issue 134, 22 September 1871, Page 3

WATER AND WOOD.

(To the Editor of the Mount Ida Chronicle.)

Sie, —I am glad to find that my humble effusion has in some measure tended to renew ventilation on the above subjects, although your correspondents seem rather to confine their efforts to an exhibition of what they evidently deem cutting criticism. If they have pleased themselves, well and good, for, most assuredly, they have not in any measure displeased me. I may, however, be permitted to remark that the highly aristocratic family of " Buggins " must have extended with lightning-like rapidity, or else even a forty-fifth cousin would scarcely have found his way into this sparsly settled portion of the world. I suspect it took your "Hogburn Jeff" some time and trouble to concoct his brilliant composition, and feel confident that the author would be the greatest admirer, when in print. As far as lam concerned, your versatile correspondents may in future feel assured that it will take as much of their ink to nettle me as it would take rain to pass through the feathered coat of a web-footed fowl; and even should it please them to -concoct similar effusions they can, with impunity, have the last fling, as I do not deem it worth the trouble, and shall not notice them.

With reference to the water question, I opine that too much cannot be said or written upon it, and even though the most unlikely schemes may be mooted, it is quite within the range of possibility, if not probability, that constant ventilation, embodying an interchange of ideas (even if some are of an utopian character), is far more likely to lead to practical good, than can ever whole lives devoted to versatile or sneering criticism. Although not an engineer, and certainly not an hydraulic one, I have had sufficient practical experience amongst machinery to know what can be done by pumping, &c, and if water will not run uphill, I am of opinion that in some cases it can be made mainly to work itself up, after once lifted from its original source or channel. Sup-

pose, for instance, a good creek exists in the neighborhood of any diggings, which creek is three to four hundred feet or more below the workings requiring water, that a small steam engine be stationed, with the necessary pumping gear, to raise it to a fluming more or less in height, according to the power applied (say 100 feet), such fluming conveying the water on to a water wheel which would repump the water into another fluming at a higher situation, being again conveyed on to another wheel and repumped higher, and so on to almost any required height, and on reaching the summit a dam, or dams, are formed to receive the water raised night and dny. A large number of heads of water would be raised by a small steam engine to start it, and, even if not applicable to Mount Tda, it will become so in some portion of our Groldfields; and who can tell how many of your present subsfi-ibiTs and readers (even scoffing " Jeff" nnd " Hopeful ") may yet be glad that they met with fertility enough on the Hogburn to suggest the way to grow and ripen fruit somewhere in their path. I was about to give further explanation touching the spent water and tailings, and also about forest trees, &c, but as I have already readied the limit assigned by you I must defer such portions until another publication.—l am, &c, Progress.