T6 WHAT I KNOW OF FAKMLSG. 



the current employed to moisten and fertilize the 

 field next below it ; and so field after field was re- 

 freshed and enriched, to the husbandman's satisfaction 

 and profit. It may be that the rich glades of English 

 Lancashire bear heavier average crops; but those of 

 Lombardy are rarely excelled on the globe. 



Why should not our Atlantic slope have its Lom- 

 bardy? Utah, Nevada, and California, exhibit raw, 

 crude suggestions of such a system ; but why should 

 the irrigation of the New World be confined to 

 regions where it is indispensable, when that of the 

 Old is not? I know no good reason whatever, for 

 leaving an American field unirrigated where water 

 to flow it at will can be had at a moderate cost. 



When I first bought laud (in 1853) I fully purpos- 

 ed to provide for irrigating my nearly level acres at 

 will, and I constructed two dams across my upland 

 stream with that view ; but they were so badly 

 planned that they went off in the flood caused by a 

 tremendous rain the next Spring; and, though I 

 rebuilt one of them, I submitted to a miscalculation 

 which provided for taking the water, by means of a 

 syphon, out of the pond at the top and over the bank 

 that rose fifteen or twenty feet above the surface of 

 the water. Of course, air would work into the pipe 

 after it had carried a stream unexceptionably for two 

 or three days, and then the water would ran no longer. 

 Had I taken it from the bottom of the pond through 

 my dam, it wonld have run forever, (or so long as 

 there was water covering its inlet in the pond ;) but 



