108 EXPERIMENT STATION RECORD. 



was taken for granted that the water would be absorbed or evaporated, 

 and get away somehow without doing any harm. This may hold good 

 for high-lying lands, but alongside of these are low-lying lands into 

 which the irrigation water from above will percolate and produce 

 water logging and marsh." 



This is exactly what has happened in many places in our own country, 

 rendering land practically useless and often causing it to be abandoned 

 for cultivation. Where the evil has not progressed so far as this, 

 alkali has taken possession of vast tracts of land, greatly restricting 

 its value and the uses to which it can be put, and even rendering it 

 unfit for any crops. 



The speaker advised that the drainage canal should be constructed 

 along with the irrigation canal, and he quoted no less an authority than 

 Sir W. Willcocks in support of this. The latter states that the capacity 

 of the drain should be one-third of that of the canal. 4i The two should 

 be kept carefully apart— the canal following the ridges, the drain fol- 

 lowing the hollows of the country, and one in no case obstructing the 

 other. This subject of drainage early occupied the attention of the 

 English engineers in Egypt. In the last twenty years many hundred 

 miles of drains have been excavated, some as large as fifty feet width of 

 bed and ten feet deep." 



A survey like the above shows that in this country we are, relatively 

 speaking, only at the beginning of irrigation development. A large 

 proportion of our first efforts have been little more than temporary 

 makeshifts, and have lacked that degree of stability and permanency 

 which characterizes the works of the Old World and which is so 

 important when we consider the dependence of arid agriculture upon 

 irrigation. This dependence is not temporary, as are some conditions 

 of agriculture, but is to be reckoned with as a permanent requirement 

 of farming. Mr. Moncrieff, while mentioning some of our larger and 

 better works, comments upon them as a whole as "often rude and of 

 a temporary nature, the extensive use of timber striking a foreigner 

 from the Old World." He also refers to the lack of a weli-devised 

 scheme of water control, such as exists in Italy and elsew r here. 



It required time, of course, to convince capital of the possibilities of 

 irrigated agriculture and to bring about a faith which warranted more 

 permanent works; and as the experiments had all to be made by private 

 enterprise the surprise is not at the imperfect character of these works, 

 but at the public spirit and enterprise which have made some of our larger 

 and more difficult works possible. Sir W. Willcocks has said that "if 

 private enterprise can not succeed in irrigation works of magnitude in 

 America, it will surely not succeed in any other country in the world." 



Our progress now. both in the development work and the investi- 

 gation of irrigation problems, is in line with that in other countries. 



