YALE AGRICULTURAL LECTURES. 93 



ferred. No tiles are burned, without warping and shrinking ; 

 now the ends should be well fitted together, and no kind but 

 pipe-tile can be turned over to make good fits, one with an 

 other, and still be right side up. This is the objection to the 

 sole-tile, made at Albany and elsewhere, and largely employed. 

 They must be set sole down, and if the lot purchased be much 

 warped, a straight water-course cannot be insured, and the dram, 

 is correspondingly unreliable. The objection to " horseshoe " 

 tile is, that in a soft bottom its narrow sides sink so as to render 

 the drain sometimes useless; besides which, they, having a 

 heavy weight to bear upon an unarched bottom, are liable to 

 split lengthwise through the back ; and, further, the stream of 

 water spread over a flat surface cannot run so rapidly, and is 

 less able to sweep away obstructions, as when the same volume 

 is condensed into tubular form, narrowed at the bottom. 

 Thinking that water could not get into the close-fitted and 

 close-textured tiles, many in Scotland, in former times, put a 

 foot or so of small stones over their tile, and soil upon that a 

 foolish and expensive process this, for there is no trouble to 

 get water into your insignificant-looking drains it takes care 

 of that itself; the trouble has been to account for its wonder 

 ful inpouring through such small orifices. Parkes, the great 

 English drainer, states, after experiments, that only 5 J of 

 the water gets through the pores of the tile ; the balance is 

 admitted through the joints. English farmers make their 

 ditches a foot wide at top, four inches at the bottom, and with 

 an appropriate tool, scoop out a little round trough in which to 

 lay their pipes. The soil is then packed upon them, without fur 

 ther trouble or anxiety as to the result. Drains well laid last 

 more than fifty years. A half century is the time counted 

 upon by the English land drainage companies, at the end of 

 which the whole amount of their loans to the farmer is to be 

 paid in. Water enters tile-drains at bottom, not at top ; for 

 the same reason that if you pour water into a cask of sand, 

 with holes made in the sides at several heights, the lowest hole 



