Like opposing interests for and against improvements in the channel, between which the battle of locks and weirs was fought, two opposing forces have been striving for mastery in the tideway of the channel. One contending for an estuary, the other for a delta. Draining a district six thousand square miles in extent, having a fall of two hundred and twenty feet in its descent from its source on Plynlymmon, (1,500 feet above the sea line), to its tideway in the Bristol Channel, and being fed by boisterous brooks and precipitous streams that cut their way through shales and clays and sand-rocks, it is not surprising that the Severn should bring down a vast amount of silt to raise its bed. To correct these irregularities along a portion of the river, improvements, projected by Sir William Cubitt, some years since, were completed at very considerable outlay, after an expenditure of £70,000 before the sanction of Parliament could be obtained. Above Stourport, where these improvements terminate, the river is still in a state of nature. Except some pedling attempts by means of earth, loose stones, or sinking some dilapidated boats along the side, nothing has been done to improve the channel. The scouring action of the stream constantly undermines the banks. These give way after every flood, and come down to choke the river, or to change the channel, and every newly-formed shoal sends the stream at right angles to its bed to make fresh attempts upon its banks. Fords that served our painted ancestors to make incursions beyond their boundaries, bends almost amounting to circles around which they paddled their canoes, impede navigation still. Attempts to overcome these natural obstacles to its navigation were made as early as 1784, when Mr. Jessop proposed to render the river navigable for vessels drawing four feet at all seasons of the year from Worcester to Coalbrookdale. He proposed to obtain a sufficient depth for that purpose at all seasons of the year by the erection of 13 or 14 weirs between those places; he also recommended that that depth should be obtained below Diglis by dredging and correcting the natural channel of the river, and the Stafford and Worcester Canal Company, joined by the iron manufacturers of Shropshire, applied in the year 1786 to parliament for powers to carry out Mr. Jessop’s recommendations, so far as they related to the portion of the river described in the title of the bill, as from Meadow-wharf, Coalbrookdale, to the deep water at Diglis, below the city of Worcester. The bill was lost owing to the objections on the part of the public to the erection of locks and weirs, and owing to the dislike of the carriers to pay toll at all seasons of the year. As it is, there are often three, four, and five months when barges cannot navigate the river with a freight equal to defray the expenses of working them; indeed, instances have occurred in which in only two months of the twelve the river could