RIPARIAN RIGHTS, in law, the rights of the proprietors of lands bordering on livers or other natural water courses. The old common law definition of a navigable liver, as one in which, and only as far as, the tide ebbs and flows, is rejected in this country, and the word navigable is used in its wider sense. The state, in ease cf navi gable rivers, has control of the shore below high water mark, or, if not tidal, below the .average water line, and may control the erection of wharves or other constructions, though the public are not to be restrained in the exercise of the privileges of fishing and navigation. It follows that,no obstruction is allowed except by the consent of the legis lature. Unnavigable streams are sometimes called private rivers. The proprietors on either side own the bed of the stream up to the middle line. The bed cannot therefore be widened or enlarged so as to bring the river into public use without compensation to the riparian proprietors. But the latter have no ownership in the water itself but Oily the right of use. They may therefore employ the stream for purposes of industry or ornamentation but must not interfere with similar rights of proprietors above or below, or overflow and damage their lands. They may divert it from its natural channel while
passing through their land, but must restore it thereto at its exit. •If the land on the opppositc sides be owned by different parties, their right to the use of the water is an undivided one, and one party cannot deprive tile other of the use. Some states have passed statutes allowing the owners of certain kinds of manufactories or mills to acquire the right of flowing the lands of others by .(lamming, the stream, nuclei• the power of eminent domain and through commissions appointed for that purpose. Alluvion, the soil added to a shore by gradual natural processes, is the property of the owner of such shore. But where ftruision, the sudden removal of large quantities of the soil from the laud of one owner to another occurs, the title to such land does not change. So, if the stream change its course, the former boundary is not changed but the whole river bed may become the property of him through whose land it flows.