THE IRRIGATION AGE. 163 



than all the nostrums that were ever unloaded upon the unwary horti- 

 culturist. Nature abhors a weakling in the plant world. Once let 

 the development of a plant suffer from lack of cultivation or nourish 

 ment or moisture or from wounds or other causes and you will find 

 Nature loosing upon it all the troop of plant-woes locked up in that 

 Pandora-box of hers. If there is a feeble tree in the orchard that is 

 the one sure to be infested by borers, both round and flat-headed, the 

 coddling-moths, the gougers and curculio, the bacteria, and fungi and 

 microbes and wooly-aphis and straight-haired aphis and myriads of 

 spores and various other things. For fortifying against this swarm 

 the application of water is cheaper and better than "powder-guns"' or 

 pomological vermifuge cheaper because in thousands of Kansas 

 gardens, it will cost less to apply, and then being applied is also the 

 most efficacious. It is efficacious because water is life; and whenever 

 the life of the tree or plant is kept unchecked and bounding from 

 start to finish, there is no foothold for enemies of the plant. It is not 

 an unusual feature of fertilizer advertising to urge the prospective 

 user of the same to give his crop, where the fertilizer is applied, 

 double the usual cultivation. Nothing is said about double the usual 

 cultivation where the fertilizer is not applied. But when you irrigate, 

 you've got to give more than ordinary cultivation to keep the soil 

 from baking; that extra tillage must be given also at a time when the 

 ground is in that condition of moisture when cultivation seems to do 

 so much good. Many of us need a spur to get a proper movement on 

 our cultivators and tools. Nothing insures action in this regard with 

 the horticulturist more certainly than garden irrigation. 



Finally, brethern, I suggest that most of us keep our buildings 

 insured against fire which seldom comes more than once or twice in a 

 life-time, to most men never; others of us are insured against acci- 

 dents, which hardly ever come to our assistance after we've arranged 

 for a hundred dollars a week while the hurt lasts; still others have 

 our lives insured, a doubtful sort of investment, wherein we have but 

 one solitary chance, and it postponed to the very end of our careers, 

 to win back our purchase money. But when it comes to insuring 

 our garden crops against disaster by the application of water, there 

 is no part of America, not the most favorable, where you couldn't get 

 some returns from our irrigation insurance, and in half the summers 

 there are dry spells that cause many of us more loss in three or four 

 rainless weeks than we have lost by fire in twenty years. 



J. Max Clark told me once that though he was sent by the Greeley 

 Colony to Europe to study Italian and the system of irrigation, yet 

 the conditions in Colorado were so different from any he found abroad 

 that they had to develop plans of their own. It will be so with us. 

 And if I have not been able to give you such definite information on 

 this subject as I desired, I am confronted by the reflection that what- 



