456 IRRIGATION IN EUROPE. 
where attended with effects which, if less in degree, are anal- 
ogous in character, to those resulting from it in Egypt. 
There are few things in European husbandry which surprise 
English or American observers so much as the extent to which 
irrigation is employed in agriculture, and that, too, on soils, and 
with a temperature, where their own experience would have led 
them to suppose it would be injurious to vegetation rather than 
beneficial to it. In Switzerland, for example, grass-grounds on 
the very borders of glaciers are freely irrigated, and on the 
Italian slope of the Alps water is applied to meadows at heights 
exceeding 6,000 feet. The summers in Northern Italy, though 
longer, are very often not warmer than in the Northern United 
States; and in ordinary years, the summer rains are as frequent 
and as abundant in the former country as in the latter.* Yet 
* The mean annual precipitation in Lombardy is thirty-six inches, of which 
nearly two-thirds fall during the season of irrigation. The rain-fall is about 
the same in Piedmont, though the number of days in the year classed as 
‘‘yainy ” is said to be but twenty-four in the former province while it is 
seventy in the latter.—Bargp Smitu, Italian Irrigation, vol.i., p. 196. 
The necessity of irrigation in the great alluvial plain of Northern Italy is 
partly explained by the fact that the superficial stratum of fine earth and 
vegetable mould is very extensively underlaid by beds of pebbles and gravel 
brought down by mountain torrents at a remote epoch. The water of the 
surface-soil drains rapidly down into these loose beds, and passes off by sub- 
terranean channels to some unknown point of discharge ; but this circumstance 
alone is nota sufficient solution. Is it not possible that the habits of vege- 
tables, grown in countries where irrigation has been immemorially employed, 
have been so changed that they require water under conditions of soil and 
climate where their congeners, which have not been thus indulgently treated, 
do not? Itisaremarkable fact that during the season of irrigation, when large 
tracts of surface are almost constantly saturated with water, there is an 
extraordinary dryness in the atmosphere of Lombardy, the hygrometer stand- 
ing for days together a few degrees only above zero, while in winter the in- 
strument indicates extreme humidity of the air, approaching to total satur- 
ation.—Barrp Situ, Italian Irrigation, i., p. 189. 
There are some atmospheric phenomena in Northern Italy, which an 
American finds it hard to reconcile with what he has observed in the United 
States. To an American eye, for instance, the sky of Piedmont, Lombardy, 
and the northern coast of the Mediterranean, is always whitish and curdled, 
and it never has the intensity and fathomless depth of the blue of his native 
