Devonshire canals are short and unimportant. The hilly country is not adapted for them; and such traffic as some of them once enjoyed has been absorbed by the railways. There is, however, a good deal of traffic on the Exeter Canal--constructed in 1566, and therefore one of the oldest ship canals in England and the first lock-canal in the kingdom--but it is worked at a loss. Most of the Bude Canal has been abandoned, and only two miles of it are now in use. The Grand Western Canal, running ten-and-a-half miles eastward from Tiverton, nearly to the Somerset border--all that was ever made of a waterway intended to reach Taunton--the Stover Canal, two miles in length, and the Hackney Canal, only half-a-mile long, both connected with the river Teign, are all under the control of the Great Western Railway. No Devonshire river is now of much value as a waterway. There is some traffic on some of the estuaries, especially the Teign; and the Tamar is navigable to Gunnislake, a distance of twenty miles. There are in our county some very old lines of stone-tramway for horse-traction; from Tavistock to Princetown, for example, and from the Heytor quarries to the head of the Stover Canal, but they are no longer in use. Down the former was brought granite to build London Bridge. The railway from London to Bristol was opened by the Great Western Company in 1841, was continued to Exeter by the Bristol and Exeter Company in 1844, and to Plymouth by the South Devon Company in 1846. Atmospheric pressure was tried for a time between Exeter and Newton Abbot, but it was a failure, and was soon superseded by steam-traction. Brunel's railways were made on the broad-gauge system with seven feet between the rails, in order to give stability to the trains and to allow of a high rate of speed; and the entire line from London to Plymouth was broad gauge. Most other companies, however, adopted the narrow gauge, in which there is only four feet eight-and-a-half inches between the rails; and owing mainly to the inconvenience of not being able to interchange rolling-stock with other lines, the Great Western Railway Company have converted their whole system to narrow gauge. [Illustration: Teignmouth: the Coast Line and Sea-wall]