Between London and Hull there are two routes, one 282 miles with one hundred and sixty-four locks, and the other 305 miles with one hundred and forty-eight locks. On the journey from London to the Severn, a boat would pass through one hundred and thirty locks in 177 miles in going to the Avonmouth Docks (this total including one hundred and six locks in 86 miles between Reading and Hanham, on the Kennet and Avon Canal); and either one hundred and two locks in 191 miles, or two hundred and thirty in 219 miles, if the destination were Sharpness Docks. Between Liverpool and Hull there are one hundred and four locks in 187 miles by one route; one hundred and forty-nine in 159 miles by a second route; and one hundred and fifty-two in 149 miles by a third. In the case of a canal boat despatched from Birmingham, the position would be--to London, one hundred and fifty-five locks in 147 miles; to Liverpool (1) ninety-nine locks in 114 miles, (2) sixty-nine locks in 94 miles; to Hull, sixty-six locks in 164 miles; to the Severn, Sharpness Docks (1) sixty-one locks in 75 miles, (2) forty-nine locks in 89 miles. Early in 1906 a correspondent of _The Standard_ made an experimental canal journey from the Thames, at Brentford, to Birmingham, to test the qualities of a certain "suction-producer gas motor barge." The barge itself stood the test so well that the correspondent was able to declare:--"In the new power may be found a solution of the problem of canal traction." He arrived at this conclusion notwithstanding the fact that the motor barge was stopped at one of the locks by a drowned cat being caught between the barge and the incoming "butty" boat. The journey from London to Birmingham occupied, "roughly," six and a half days--a journey, that is, which London and North-Western express trains accomplish regularly in two hours. The 22-1/2 miles of the Warwick and Birmingham Canal, which has thirty-four locks, alone took ten hours and a half. From Birmingham the correspondent made other journeys in the same barge, covering, altogether, 370 miles. In that distance he passed through three hundred and twenty-seven locks, various summits "several hundred feet" in height being crossed by this means.