seems superfluous to say that all the reports he did make "were
exhaustive and eminently instructive in their treatment of the subjects
discussed."

Perhaps the two most important professional cases submitted to him were
those in 1884 on the estuary and bar of the Mersey River and on
Galveston Harbor. In the case of the Mersey he was called in, at the
solicitation of the Mersey Docks and Harbor Board of Liverpool, to
settle a dispute. Appearing before a committee of the House of Lords,
he gave his testimony as to the effect which the proposed terminal
works of the Manchester ship canal would have upon the estuary of the
Mersey and the bar at Liverpool. "He brought to the solution of this
question that same keen insight into hydraulics and the same close
application that had made him so successful in this country." He showed
so plainly what would inevitably be the deleterious results of the
proposed plans that the committee decided against them. Subsequently
they were changed to conform to his suggestions. For this report he
received L3500, said to have been the largest fee ever paid to a
consulting engineer.

In the Galveston case, the same year, he was requested, not only by the
city but by the state legislature, to formulate a plan and to take a
contract from the United States government for improving that harbor.
The government had already been carrying on works there for several
years and accomplishing nothing. Indeed, it was the jetty method--by
this time more highly thought of than ten years before--which was being
attempted, but not in proper form. Eads, after long and careful study
of the situation, made a plan, which he offered to carry out on
conditions very similar to those adopted in the case of the Mississippi
Jetties, but Congress was not willing to grant the contract. Since
then, however, the works there have been altered according to his
suggestions, and have consequently been more successful.

For a good many years, owing to the weakness of his lungs and to other
illness, Eads had not only had to travel much for his health, but to
take special care of himself generally; and yet, to judge from the
following account, in the first person, of how he had spent the year
1880, it seems that his wondrous energy had not failed: "I inspected
the River Danube about 800 miles of its course; and investigated the
cause and extent of the frightful inundation at Szegedin, in Hungary,
which involved an examination