54 THE NEW AGRICULTURE. 



accomplishment as the sinking of a well, or of an ordinary cistern. 



" You will find the grasses of your dooryards and lawns and the 

 plants in your gardens greenly growing and making root all winter 

 beneath the snows; and the snows melting at their bottoms, the 

 waters will find their way to bases of slopes at temperature several 

 degrees above freezing. You w r ill find water, evolved on and out 

 from your lakes, hung up along your hillsides sufficient to provide 

 all of reserve needed to hold the Hudson at high tide during every 

 month of the year; and, applying like principles to what has been 

 denominated the Great American desert, you will see gathered in 

 those torrents of water continually descending the slopes of the 

 Sierras and Rockies, coming of melting snows and passing on 

 from trench to trench, borne down mountain sides, across plain, 

 and descending into valleys, nowhere appearing on the surface, 

 except as man may direct, making confluence with the rivers in 

 purity and perpetuity of flow. 



" You will find surface and subsoils alike made softer, more 

 porous and spongy, alkali extracted or again infused, salts, ammonia, 

 etc., evenly diffused, fertilization perfected, and production in- 

 creased to a degree beyond computation. You will find hundreds, 

 yea, thousands of trees growing, giving shade and bearing fruits 

 to where one is being felled by the woodman's axe, and clouds 

 forming and rains and dews descending in hitherto rainless and 

 treeless regions. The English grasses, growing greenly all over 

 our southland amid the fervors of the summer solstice, will give 

 to our brethren of that section the milk and honey, butter and 

 cheese, and other like products of our graver north lands. By way 

 of experiment, try this method on the dooryards, lawns, gardens, 

 etc., about your houses, and let your city fathers look into it and 

 make up their minds to have babbling brooks, with occasional cas- 

 cades, dropping waters crystal-clear into miniature lakes of the parks 



