1885.] DRAINING MARSH LANDS. 119 



The seeds of those varieties difficult to transplant should be sown 

 in boxes 3 or 4 inches deep. They should have holes in the 

 bottom for drainage, and for fine seeds should also be well drained 

 with potsherds or other coarse material. The boxes may be stored 

 in a pit and covered, not thickly enough to keep them from freezing, 

 but so as when once frozen not to thaw until spring. Trees raised 

 in this way can be transplanted with the smallest possible risk. 

 The boxes must be protected the second winter, as the young seed- 

 lings would be sure to suffer with so little depth of soil. In this 

 way many of the finer seeds can be grown that it is impossible to 

 orow out of doors. 



DRAINING MARSH LANDS. 



DE. C. W. CHANCELLOE, in an interesting paper read before the 

 Farmers' Society of Maryland, Virginia, in referring to the 

 proposed drainage of marshes in his own State, gives the following 

 details of the drainage by machinery of extensive tracts of marsh 

 land in European countries : — The young power of steam, applied to 

 the drainage of marshes, has quite supplanted windmills in all parts 

 of England, and is also extensively used in Holland. The usual 

 arrangement is a vertical scoop- wheel which dashes the water up an 

 ascending curve with great power. In what is called the " Great 

 Level," where there were formerly 700 windmills, there are now 

 only a few ; but the number of steam pumps employed is about 

 seventy, varying from 10 to 80 horse-power, and raising the drainage 

 water of at least 250,000 acres. The centrifugal pump surpasses 

 even the wheel in the percentage of duty it performs in proportion 

 to the power employed. 



One of these pumps has been found to drain effectually a marsh 

 of upwards of 3000 acres. The disk, four feet and a half in 

 diameter, worked by a 25 horse-power engine, throws up 75 

 tons of water per minute, five feet high, or 100 tons per minute 

 between two and three feet high. Exaggerated conceptions are 

 frequently formed of the cost of raising water with pumps worked 

 by steam power. It appears from the best evidence collected on 

 this subject that the cost is really an insignificant item. The siphon 

 has been recently shown, as at Warwick and at Culhorn House, 

 Wigtownshire, to be a more satisfactory instrument of marsh drainage 

 than either the windmill or steam engine, while involving much less 

 working expense. 



