72 * THE NEAY AGRICULTURE. 



be greatly, almost immeasurably, stimulated by underground irri- 

 gation. He had neither time nor opportunity then to perfect and 

 test his thought, but it continued to simmer through him and to 

 recall itself to his attention again and again as the years passed on. 



" His conviction on the matter was greatly strengthened and stim- 

 ulated by a conversation with Mr. Horace Greeley, in which that 

 gentleman told him what he had heard of the wondrous produc- 

 tiveness near Los Angeles, California, where vegetation was fed by 

 a subterranean river. Mr. Cole had thought and investigated un- 

 til he had no doubt about the fact of a theory, but how to accom- 

 plish the irrigation how to make his thought practical, was the 

 question. 



" At last how to do it dawned suddenly upon him the mists of 

 questionings and doubts were gone his dream of the years had 

 materialized his vision was clear. Where could he better test 

 and demonstrate the truth and value of his discovery than on his 

 own sterile, unpromising hillside. Along its eastern front runs a 

 highway with wayside gutter adjoining his land. Parallel with 

 this, and some forty to fifty feet apart, and across about half his 

 land to its highest boundary, he caused a series of trenches about 

 two and a half feet wide by four and a half to five feet deep to be 

 dug, and filled to within eighteen inches of the surface with coarse 

 large stone covered with loose flat stone, for subterranean water 

 reservoirs. These reservoirs were connected by numerous shallow 

 and smaller trenches partially filled with small stones at about eigh- 

 teen inches from the surface and designed to carry off from trench 

 to trench all surplus water. After the laying of the stone all the 

 trenches, little and big, are covered with straw or litter of any 

 kind, as in ordinary ditching, and then covered with dirt. Thus 

 each large trench is a reservoir capable of holding from three to 

 three and a half feet of water through its entire length before it 



