SUMMER NUMBER 19 
land elsewhere to more than satisfy all nations. Best of all, 
the land could now be easily apportioned because it is cheap 
and only potentially desirable. Civilization can hardly survive 
another general war for “a place in the sun’. If we, instead 
of fighting one another for land already fully occupied by man- 
kind, will only fight the pestilence carrying mosquito, and till 
the lands from which she now excludes us, there need not only 
be no more wars of conquest, but there will be no necessity for 
birth control or for plagues to keep down the numbers of over- 
crowded and underfed. 
There are millions of acres of such land right here in our 
own country. This land has not been reclaimed, among other 
reasons because of the hitherto prohibitively large cash outlay 
necessary. The purpose of this article is to show how this can 
be done at a cost of practically nothing over and above the 
amount that always has to be spent in clearing land to make it 
fit for farming. Here is how it actually was done on our farm 
in Florida. The land in question is a typical specimen of ma- 
larial land in the southeastern part of this country. The meth- 
ods successfully used here will, with but little modification, 
answer anywhere in the South. 
We have a beautiful spring nearly two hundred feet deep, 
covering about three acres, with an outlet creek about four 
feet deep and thirty wide. On the south of the spring is a 
six foot bank with high land behind it. On the other sides of 
the spring, and along both banks of the stream, is a strip of cut 
over cypress swamp and marshland averaging about fifty feet 
in width. Beyond the marsh the land gradually rises to about 
twelve feet above lake level. The creek was choked with water 
lettuce and other aquatic plants and there was a border about 
fifteen feet wide of the same material all around the spring. 
A large fish-free pond about fifty yards to the west of where 
our house was to be not only bred mosquitoes, but in wet 
weather overflowed our proposed garden site. A ditch sixty 
yards long was dug from the pond through the end of a half 
acre hummock marsh one hundred feet away, and from there 
into the spring. The marsh land was grid-ironed with shal- 
low ditches, all connected with the main ditch. The muck from 
the ditches was piled on the hummocks for banana plants and 
put into barrels for strawberries. The ditches were dug around 
the hummocks so that the marsh, instead of a series of puddles, 
became one body of water all of the year. 
