A treatise on waterworks for the supply of cities and towns : with a description of the principal geological formations of England as influencing supplies of water / by Samuel Hughes.

  • Hughes, Samuel.
Date:
1872
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on waterworks for the supply of cities and towns : with a description of the principal geological formations of England as influencing supplies of water / by Samuel Hughes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    27/484 (page 9)
    structed during the reign of the Emperors, as the Aqua Vir- ginia, in the reign of Augustus, the aqueduct for conveying the Anio in the reign of Nero, and the Aqua Claudia in the reign of Caligula. This last work commenced at the distance of 3S miles from Rome, and was formed under ground for 36} miles, about 3 miles of which consisted of tunnelling. The supply of water to ancient Rome was com- puted by Professor Leslie, on the authority of Sextus Julius Erontinus, who was inspector of the aqueducts under the Em- peror Nerva, and who has left a valuable treatise on the subject, at 50 million cubic feet per day for a population of one million souls. This gives the immense average per head of 50 cubic feet, or 312 gallons, a consumption quite unequalled in modern times, except in the city of New York, where it is said to have amounted nearly to this quantity. The Roman aqueducts were mostly built of brickwork, and consisted of nearly square piers carried up to a uniform level, allowing for the fall of the water, and connected by serai- circular arches, on which the conduit for carrying the water was placed. The conduit had a paved or tiled floor, side walls of brick or stone, and a roof formed by an arch turned across it, or by a flat coping of stone. Various opinions have been hazarded by modern writers to account for the peculiar practice adopted by the Romans of conveying their water by means of a uniform channel through hills and over valleys, instead of adopting the modern system of following the undulations of the country by passing over hills and descending to the bottoms of valleys. A writer in Lardner's Cyclopaedia thus expresses himself: Ignorance of the principle by which liquids return to their level is shown in the construction of aqueducts by the ancients, for supplying water to towns. This supposition is grossly inconsistent with the skill and acquaintance with the laws of nature displayed by the Romans and other great nations of antiquity, as exhibited in the very aqueducts which this writer condemns. Professor Leslie says nothing can be worse founded than the opinion that the Romans were unacquainted