EDITORIAL. L07 



of water, imt it Is calculated that it will increase the land rental by 

 over $13,000,< and its sale value by upward of $130,000,000. 



Hut in spite of these large enterprises, wells and small reservoirs are 

 employed t<> a large extent in some countries, and have the advantage 

 of placing the control of the water in the hand- of the farmer. It was 

 stated that about thirteen million acres, or 30 per cent of the lands 

 irrigated in India, are watered by wells. Small reservoirs are also 

 very numerous. In the native state of Mysore there are about forty 

 thousand irrigation reservoirs, or practically three to every four 

 square miles, and in southern India no less than ninety thousand of 

 these small reservoirs are recorded. 



The large volume of water required to be stored for an acre of land 

 is often a matter of surprise to those who have not given the subject 

 attention. Mr. Moncrieff stated that in India the storage of a million 

 cubic feet of water does not suffice for more than six or eight acres of 

 rice, while about one-third as much would be required for wheat. He 

 speaks of districts so flat that to store water enough to irrigate an acre 

 requires the drowning of more than an equal area: but as the irrigated 

 acre yields eight or ten times as much as the unirrigated one. the idea 

 is not as impractical as would at first appeal-. After the storage reser- 

 voir has been emptied it is often possible to raise a good crop on the 

 saturated bed. 



Improvement in the means of raising water is one of the most im- 

 portant of recent developments in irrigation. Measured by value, 

 nearly one-tenth of the irrigated products of this country are now 

 grown with water lifted by pumps. In the rice districts of Louisiana 

 one-fourth of the outlay in growing a crop is for pumping; and man- 

 ifestly the efficiency of the pumping machinery employed, which has 

 been found in our own investigations to vary all the way from 5 to 82 

 per cent, has much to do with the profits of farming. 



The centrifugal pump is rapidly coming into use in connection with 

 irrigation, and is being extensively installed in this country where 

 pumping is required. It is interesting to learn that these pumps are 

 taking the place of the primitive shadoof, which has been forages the 

 method employed for raising water alone- the Nile. As the cotton and 

 sugarcane crops in that country yield from $30 to $40 an acre, or 

 even $50, the well to do farmer can afford a centrifugal pump run by 

 steam power. There are now many hundreds of these pumps, fixed 

 or portable, working on tin 4 Nile banks of Egypt. 



Mr. Moncrieff was very strongly of the opinion that irrigation 

 should be accompanied by drainage, a view which is coming to be 

 widely held in this country. Speaking specifically upon the subject, 

 he said: " In the great irrigation systems which I have been describ- 

 ing, for a long time little or no attention was paid to drainage. It 



