Quite as interesting, every way, as the Pike, and more so in some respects, are the great reservoirs belonging to the Liverpool Waterworks, altogether out of sight from the railway, but as a spectacle from the hill-side undeniably one of the most charming in the county. The area of the entire water-surface is five hundred acres; the supply comes from ten thousand acres of moorland above, brought down chiefly by the little rivers called the Douglas, the Yarrow, and the Roddlesworth. The Act of Parliament authorising the construction of these great reservoirs was obtained in 1847. Water was first delivered from them in Liverpool January 2nd, 1857. Rivington Pike, after all, is not the highest point of the range. Winter Hill, well named, so wild and cold and dreary is the complexion, and so often is it beaten by storms, claims a considerably greater altitude.
By this same line we go also to Chorley for Whittle-le-Woods, distant only four miles from Hoghton Tower, a romantic and secluded spot, noted for its historical associations, its "Springs," and, if we care to pursue a quiet and pretty walk by the edge of the canal, for wild-flowers found nowhere else near Manchester. Excepting in the canal at Disley, there is not another within the distance where there are in particular so many pond-weeds, that beautiful plant the _lucens_ leading the way. Of these submerged things the question has been asked perhaps more frequently than of any others, What use are they? Rest upon them, then, for a moment. Use is a triple idea. Taking the entire mass of the vegetation of our planet, first there is economic use, as for food, which last being rendered to brute creatures as well as to mankind, is at the best but at a low and menial one. Secondly, comes the admirable use subserved by beauty, which brutes are incapable of appreciating, and blindness to which, like the use of foul and profane language, may be taken perhaps as the infallible sign of an imbecile. Plants can never be truly learned, nor is their highest use realised so long as we rest in the contemplation, albeit so salutary, even of their loveliness. Their last and crowning use comes of their _interpreting_ power. There is not a species that does not cast some welcome side-light, that does not open our understanding to something previously unperceived. The pond-weeds do this, if nothing below, so that meeting with them we may rejoice.