P K E F A C E. 



This work is respectfully offered to those American 

 Farmers, and other cultivators of the soil, who from 

 painful experience can readily appreciate the losses which 

 result from the scarcity of water at critical periods, as 

 well as to those enterprising pioneers whose efforts are 

 showing it to be possible to reclaim from sterility the so- 

 called " Great American Desert." Being the first effort in 

 American literature in this direction, it is presented with 

 diffidence as a necessarily imperfect attempt to supply 

 the information anxiously sought for by the classes of 

 persons above indicated. The information here given 

 has been acquired during some years of observation and 

 study, and to some extent from rude, but effective prac- 

 tice. Hitherto there has been no work in the English 

 language in which the practical details of irrigation were 

 comprehensively described. The literature of the sub- 

 ject consists chiefly of the writings of French and Italian 

 authors. Systems of irrigation are neither few nor 

 modern, but all the existing methods have been the slow 

 growth of hundreds or thousands of years. ISTo one 

 would be so rash as to assert that no advance upon the 

 ancient, or even the modern methods, can be made by 

 Americans. A nation that has done so much in origi- 

 nating and developing steam navigation,, railroads, and 

 the electric telegraph, can not fail to learn the best 

 methods of utilizing streams of water, or of storing the 

 excessive rainfall of one part of the year for use in a 

 season of drouth. The fact that land, which without 

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