Abstract
THE Cantor Lectures of the Royal Society of Arts, delivered last winter by Dr. Bernard Smith, director of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, dealt with the “Geological Aspects of Underground Water Supplies”. The lectures, which give a comprehensive review of the geological conditions affecting water supplies from underground sources, are now available. In his first lecture, Dr. Smith alluded to the universality of underground water, though, in some cases, it might lie at depths too great to be of practical value, and stated that most of it, in Great Britain, is rain water, which has made its way down from the surface, though a residual quantity of ‘fossil’ or ‘connate’ water may have been held in the rocks for great periods of time. Rainfall disappears from the surface of the ground chiefly by run-off, and secondarily by percolation, evaporation and absorption by vegetation, the relative proportions at any given locality depending upon the topography, the degree of rainfall, the porosity of the soil or rock, the amount of water in the soil at the time, the amount of vegetation and the humidity of the atmosphere.
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Underground Water Supplies. Nature 137, 586–587 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137586b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137586b0