280 TRANSACTIONS OF THE HORTICULTURAL 



diy, while the hard soil below is left that much more impenetrable 

 to root fibres. The question then is, with such soils, would it not 

 be better to break them up by deep subsoiling, and allow the water 

 to filter away out of harm, and where it might be used again, in- 

 stead of conducting it aAvay beyond all possible reach? 



Many a populous graveyard is located near lands that might be 

 made healthy by judicious treatment. We might learn one lesson 

 from our owai healthy locality, by remembering its condition thirty 

 years ago. We had vast tracts of rank vegetation, both on prairie 

 and river bottom, subject to overflow and retention of excessive 

 moisture, and consequently rapid decay, when exposed to the hot 

 sun of midsummer and early autumn. This, with the decay caused 

 by breaking large tracts tor the purpose of cultivation, seems to 

 have been the chief cause of much of what was popularly known 

 as western fevers — present everywhere. Very few escaped, being 

 affected in some manner. Those who got through with their lives 

 were shattered in constitution for many years. Now all is changed; 

 no malaria, no death from that mysterious foe, no man has seen it, 

 measured or weighed it; doesn't even know what it is. So it is called 

 malaria. The word is much used and much abused. 



When we encounter some subtile influence at work upon the hu- 

 man system, we Say malaria, because we don't know what else to say. 

 Hundreds of the ills to which human flesh is heir may be attributed 

 to mal-air. Contagion is but another name for bad air. Let us see 

 how much may be applicable to our subject, drainage. 



Much rain is not unhealthy. Running or standing water is not 

 unhealthy. Much growing vegetation is not unhealthy. It is gen- 

 erally supposed that the green scum on standing water is pestilence 

 itself. That is a mistake. It is simply varieties of the myriad forms 

 of vegetable life, which, while growing, have made it possible for 

 human life to exist on the globe. Geologists tell us that during the 

 carboniferous period vegetation was so rank, growth and decay in the 

 warm, humid atmosphere went on so rapidly, that no air-breathing 

 animals could live; great geologic changes occurred. Drainage on a 

 vast scale followed; vegetation changed with the seasons; the earth 

 passed through an ice period; miasmatic influences were frozen and 

 destroyed; air-breathing animals made their appearance, and so 

 through the vast ages the earth has been becoming better fitted for 

 the support of human life. Growing vegetation absorbs noxious 

 gases; freezing destroys the germs of disease; vegetation, as long 

 as it is growing, absorbs the noxious gases that emanate from 

 low, moist grounds, where decay is constantly going on, and ren- 

 ders them innocuous. Drain off the water or dry up such lands 

 suddenly, so that vegetation dies rapidly, and pestilence stalks at 

 noonday as well as night. The remedy, then, is to surface drain 

 such lands as much as possible, then pasture them that they may 

 be kept green until frost or freezing comes. Then all lands would 



