34 THE NEW AGRICULTUBE. 



unlettered son of the Emerald Isle we learned how fuel was secured 

 in the bogs of his native Ireland. It was from the Germans, how- 

 ever, that we obtained most valuable information. Intelligent, as 

 a rule, patient workers, staid, steady, sober thinkers, slow-going, 

 and yet sure, we found them always good authority on matters of 

 soil and production, irrigation and drainage. 



Reading the Tribune daily, we never omitted to note what our 

 friend Greeley and his former editorial associates had to say about 

 farming and gardening. Forming the acquaintance and becoming 

 warmly attached to Col. D. D. T. Moore, of the old Rural New 

 Yorker, and getting acquainted with Mr. Andrew S. Fuller, a com- 

 panionable and remarkably well-informed gentleman connected 

 with the Tribune, we asked them and nearly everybody else with 

 whom we conversed, what each thought about the waste of the 

 waters coming of ordinary methods of tiling and drainage with 

 stone drains. 



Though not saying a word about it to anyone, we could not help 

 feeling provoked at seeing mankind indulging in what seemed to 

 us a wicked folly, amounting to madness, as they made haste to get 

 the waters out into seas and oceans, instead of using them while on 

 the lands, and only conducting portions of the surplus down to the 

 sea levels. 



From 1866 to 1870 we were formulating plans and devising 

 methods of drainage, which should at once irrigate lands and pro- 

 vide against stagnation of the waters, and coming across the stray 

 writings of Major Hugh T. Brooks, of Wyoming County, N. Y., he 

 seemed to us the man who had found out things which all of the 

 world ought to know by intuition. But having heard people say 

 that " what Horace Greeley and Hugh T. Brooks didn't know about 

 farming " would fill a much larger book than what a regiment of 

 that sort of farmers did know, we felt doubtful as regarded our 



