36 THE NEW AGRICULTURE. 



" Ditches and drains are made to carry the water away and they 

 do it. Ditches are the outlets, and the water will always flow away 

 in them. To keep up a supply of moisture or of water there must 

 be a holding back of the water. This is done in many ways, when 

 the avenues of nature are undisturbed. On the surface it is kept 

 in hollows or basins, where swamps and bog-holes are formed; in 

 sloughs; in mucky land; underneath rocks; under the leaves and 

 trees, where the sun does not cause it to evaporate. To prevent 

 evaporation there must be coolness, and to make coolness there 

 must be shade and humid surroundings. Under the surface it is 

 held in pockets, in veins and subteranean places where it has wash- 

 ed out its own bed, and in the constant percolating and oozing out 

 from swamps, wet places and other natural reservoirs on top of the 

 earth. AVhere there is no drainage to carry the water away it fills 

 all these fountains for the drier portions of the seasons. Each rain 

 adds to its supply. Before there was so much drainage, water was 

 furnished by wells of moderate depth and springs were plenty. 

 Now permanent springs are scarce, and the old wells get dry early 

 in the season." 



Far back in our memories of childhood we retained the faintest 

 recollection of a few lines from the pen of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, 

 found in Poor Richard's Almanac, which would serve as a text upon 

 which Col. Curtis might have based the above extract; yet that dur- 

 ing the half century in which the world had moved farther on, than 

 in any one thousand years of earth's history, foresters and farm- 

 ers should have been found manifestly retrograding on this ques- 

 tion of the world's water supply, was a mystery to us. Though we 

 had even then begun writing out the story in briefs of our new ag- 

 riculture, more than once we came near to giving up the hope of 

 living long enough to convince the world of the efficacy of our new 

 svstem. Here however was one man (Col. Curtis) at least, who had 



