My attention is called to an objection offered in your issue of 20th inst., to the plan for the improvement of the Back Bay now before the Boston City Council, and which, if the writer’s assumptions were accepted, might stir up a strong property interest against it, and defeat the pending appropriation. As I had not thought it necessary to anticipate this objection in my report on the subject, quoted by the writer, you will kindly allow me to explain my neglect to do so.

The objection is that there must be a constant rapid deposit of filthy silt in the proposed Back-Bay basin, from the water supplied to it out of Charles River; that this silt will foul the shores, and fill up the channel from which it must be removed at frequent intervals by a very costly process and with great offence to all living in the vicinity. The objection is unsound for the following reasons:

In summer all the supply required from the Charles may be let in within an hour before and after high-water, and may be all drawn from within three feet of the surface. At and near the turn of flood, the river is without perceptible current, and the water within three feet or more of the surface carries no silting matter. I have observed it frequently, when, so far as the eye could detect, it was perfectly clear.

When, under extraordinary circumstances, the water is unusually turbid, it will be unnecessary to let it into the basin. The gates may be always [482]

View of Back Bay Fens, c. 1896

But it is urged that as population increases on its banks, the river will be increasingly dirty. Both the present city engineer and his predecessor in office, and the city superintendent of sewers, are of a different opinion. The completion of works now in progress is expected to relieve the river of Boston sewage; and, looking further ahead and beyond Boston, it is likely that other expedients will in time be adopted for maintaining it in tolerable cleanliness. In no probable event is it to be anticipated that the annual deposit of silt within the basin from tidal water will be more than a mere film, or that it will be offensive.

To obtain satisfactory results upon the Back Bay without excessive expense, is a complicated problem. I acknowledge especially a certain degree of uncertainty as to what may be accomplished under the novel conditions proposed for the low ground, and I should be grateful for advice upon this point from any of your sea-coast readers, who may have had experience of approximately similar conditions. The descriptive terms of our language applicable to land subject to occasional overflow from the sea are unfortunately limited, and for want of better I spoke of that proposed to be formed in the Back-Bay as marshy and fenny. Your contributor’s second objection to the commissioners’ [483] plan is based, however, upon a more restricted use of these terms than I had supposed to be necessary. There are many sea-coast nooks of Massachusetts Bay with wooded banks into which the tide occasionally rises, and which are commonly spoken of by country people as marshy, very different in character and appealing in a very different way to the imagination from the marsh which he assumes that I have had in view.

As to his somewhat authoritative assumption of the “unloveliness” of all possible marsh detail under the circumstances, you will pardon me for repeating the familiar words of the poet:—

“Dear marshes! Vain to him the gift of sight,
Who cannot in their various incomes share.”