DEAD RIVERS.
Three times within a week, in districts of Britain two hundred miles apart, I haire stood beside streams once abound- ing in life, but now dead almost as a salt lake. It should surely be within the wit and power of man to restore at least some of these rivers to life, or life to the rivers. The diag- nosis of the malady is obscure in some streams, for instance the upper reaches of the Lea ; but it is not the least obscure in those that I saw this week. There is no brook in Eastern England that may compare with the rapids and pools that compose the bubbling rivers of the West, and that tumble to the sea from the inland hills; and these swift western strelms even when the rapid becomes a fall are of a quality that trout especially desire—every drop of water bubbles with air. Yet no eastern streams are dead like those in the West. Their more sluggish waters are lively, even where the trout have vanished. Stickleback, dace, crayfish, watersnails, caddis, and mayfly abound. The little doses of pollution from road or factory or sewage have not proved mortal to the hardier and more adaptive creatures.
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