It is true that, in this particular instance, the pack-horse had been supplemented by the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, established as the result of Parliamentary powers obtained in 1733. This navigation was conducted almost entirely by natural waterways, but it had many drawbacks and inconveniences, while the freight for general merchandise between Liverpool and Manchester by this route came to 12s. per ton. The Duke's new scheme was one for the construction of an artificial waterway which could be carried over the Irwell at Barton by means of an aqueduct. This idea he got from the aqueduct on the Languedoc Canal, in the south of France. But the Duke required a practical man to help him, and such a man he found in James Brindley. Born in 1716, Brindley was the son of a small farmer in Derbyshire--a dissolute sort of fellow, who neglected his children, did little or no work, and devoted his chief energies to the then popular sport of bull-baiting. In the circumstances James Brindley's school-teaching was wholly neglected. He could no more have passed an examination in the Sixth Standard than he could have flown over the Irwell with some of his ducal patron's coals. "He remained to the last illiterate, hardly able to write, and quite unable to spell. He did most of his work in his head, without written calculations or drawings, and when he had a puzzling bit of work he would go to bed, and think it out." From the point of view of present day Board School inspectors, and of the worthy magistrates who, with varied moral reflections, remorselessly enforce the principles of compulsory education, such an individual ought to have come to a bad end. But he didn't. He became, instead, "the father of inland navigation."