These details, of bridges and harbours, and piers and sluice-gates, may not be interesting to the reader, but they are valuable as illustrations of the credit which Smeaton enjoyed as a successful and capable engineer, and of his restless industry and indefatigable perseverance. He crowded an extraordinary amount of good and useful achievement into his active life, and whatever he did was done so carefully and conscientiously as never to require patching or re-doing. In the course of his engineering labours he traversed Great Britain from north to south, and east to west; and there was scarcely a bridge or a canal in the kingdom which he did not restore, enlarge, or in some way improve. As might be expected, he remained, throughout his life, the great authority on all questions connected with lighthouses. He erected those which on Spurn Head still guard the mouth of the Humber, and at other parts of the coast his services were called into requisition to secure their improved lightage. He was also consulted by Government respecting the national dockyards at Portsmouth and Plymouth. When a new water company was started to supply some hitherto unprovided town or district, or when an old company found it necessary to afford increased accommodation, recourse was had to the inexhaustible skill and ingenuity of Smeaton, who for a considerable period was really consulting engineer to the nation. He was called upon to advise the landowner who wished to drain his estates, and the coal-owner who desired to work his mines more safely and efficiently. There seems to have been no department of engineering science in which he was not largely and successfully employed. [Sidenote: A water-pumping engine.]