364 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



IRRIGATION OF ARID LANDS. 



By HENRY J. PH1LP0TT. 



THERE is no more striking difference between the inhabitants 

 of the Eastern and Western United States than the degree of 

 their familiarity with the word irrigation. And there will never 

 be a profounder difference than will be engendered by the thing 

 itself. The Eastern farmer irrigates his cabbage and tomato 

 plants when he first transplants them. His wife irrigates her 

 flowers. The city gentleman irrigates his lawn. But the idea of 

 watering a whole farm not a New England "patch," but a 

 Western ranch of from fifty to fifty thousand acres seems a 

 financial absurdity. What the Eastern farmer could not produce 

 without such expensive cultivation he would say was not worth 

 producing. 



Equally incredible will seem farming without irrigation to the 

 generation now growing to manhood over a large part of the 

 Pacific coast. To them it will seem an absurdity not to have the 

 water as fully under your own control as the land. They would 

 not want to cultivate land if they had to take chances on there 

 being neither too much nor too little rain. 



What would surprise the Eastern farmer still more, if he knew 

 it, is that thousands of acres of land, intended for nothing but hay 

 and pasture, are not only irrigated from ditches a dozen miles 

 long, but must first be leveled down with road-scrapers, and often 

 the grading costs twenty-five dollars an acre. This, however, ap- 

 plies only to certain forms of irrigation. My present purpose is 

 to describe a number of different ways of irrigation which I have 

 seen exemplified on a large scale. 



The simplest plan is with a street-sprinkler. It is profitable 

 on certain crops of high value per acre. For irrigating trees and 

 vines the spray may be taken off the wagon and a straight stream 

 conveyed by a short hose to the roots. I have seen vineyards of 

 one hundred acres watered in this way. It is chiefly used in tid- 

 ing young vineyards and orchards over the first year, on land 

 which thereafter will need no irrigation. It always struck me 

 rather comically to see a street-sprinkler meandering over a field 

 thirty miles from the nearest town, as if it had got lost and were 

 groping about and trying to find its way back to its native haunts. 



In such case the original source of the water may be a well or 

 a mountain canon. I confess it still staggers me to see the miles 

 of iron pipe through which a stream of irrigating water must 

 often be carried from the mountain spring to the nearest field 

 whereon it is to be used. A two-inch pipe, by the time it is laid, 



