ECONOMIZING PRECIPITATION. 487 
Economizing Precipitation. 
The methods suggested by Palissy and by Babinet are of 
limited application, and designed only to supply a sufficient 
quantity of water for the domestic use of small villages or large 
private establishments. Dumas has proposed a much more ex- 
tensive system for collecting and retaining the whole precipita- 
tion in considerable valleys, and storing it in reservoirs, whence 
it is to be drawn for household and mechanical purposes, for 
irrigation, and, in short, for all the uses to which the water of 
natural springs and brooks is applicable. His plan consists in 
draining both surface and subsoil, by means of conduits differ- 
ing in construction according to local circumstances, but in the 
main not unlike those employed in improved agriculture, col- 
lecting the water in a central channel, securing its proper fil- 
terage, checking its too rapid flow by barriers at convenient 
points, and finally receiving the whole in spacious, covered 
reservoirs, from which it may be discharged in a constant flow 
or at intervals as convenience may dictate.* 
There is no reasonable doubt that a very wide employment 
of these various contrivances for economizing and supplying 
water is practicable, and the expediency of resorting to them 
is almost purely an economical question. There appears to be 
no serious reason to apprehend collateral evils from them, and 
in fact all of them, except artesian wells, are simply indirect 
methods of returning to the original arrangements of nature, 
or, in other words, of restoring the fluid circulation of the globe; 
for when the earth was covered with the forest, perennial 
springs gushed from the foot of every hill, brooks flowed down 
the bed of every valley. The partial recovery of the fountains 
and rivulets which once abundantly watered the face of the 
agricultural world seems practicable by such means, even with- 
out any general replanting of the forests; and the cost of one 
year’s warfare—or in some countries of that armed peace which 
* M. G. Dumas, La Science des Fontaines, 1857. 
