These are the broad general facts of the situation in which Paris is placed as regards her supplies of food, fuel, and other requirements. The details of the movement of this traffic are equally interesting, but we have no space to devote to them here. We may, however, remark that from every part of the empire, from Belgium and the Ardennes, from the north and the east, from Marseilles on the one hand and from Rouen and Havre on the other, the traffic on which Paris is dependent from day to day is carried as well by waterways as by railways. From the coal basins of the Nord and of the Pas-de-Calais the waterways carry almost as much fuel to Paris as the railways; from the basins of the Loire and of the Centre they carry much more. Belgium, again, sends a large proportion of the total quantity of coal that she supplies to Paris by water, but German and English coal is received mainly by rail.[62] It would be interesting to compare the quantities of merchandise and food supplies of all kinds received by water and by rail in different large centres of population, but the materials do not exist for a very exact comparison over a wide area. In no English city can such materials be obtained, inasmuch as no record is available of the different quantities that constitute the transit trade; but in several German cities there are more accurate materials at command, and the following figures show how the import traffic of Paris compares with that of some German towns for the year 1887:— ──────────────────────┬────────────┬─────────── Tonnage brought into │ By Rail. │ By Water. ──────────────────────┼────────────┼─────────── │ tons. │ tons. Paris │ 5,647,000 │ 3,765,000 Berlin │ 3,504,000 │ 3,348,002 Hamburg │ 1,191,000 │ 3,221,000 Cologne │ 1,132,000 │ 314,000 Magdeburg │ 1,650,000 │ 1,118,000 ├────────────┼─────────── Total │ 13,124,000 │ 11,766,000 ──────────────────────┴────────────┴─────────── During the year 1886 the traffic of the port of Paris amounted to a total of 5,455,000 tons, which was transported in 35,291 boats. The boats thus carried an average of about 155 tons.[63] This, however, was composed of a considerable range of variations, the boats from the Sambre, on the canal of that name, carrying an average of 216 tons, while those on the canals of the Aisne and the Ardennes only carried about 55 tons. On the Seine, from Oise to Paris, the average size of the boats was 166 tons.