THE NEW AGRICULTURE. 119 



ing and thrifty people by saying that "in the Northern States 

 and Canada, winter irrigation is impracticable." 



In turn, we do not hesitate to declare, that if a series of trenches 

 along inclines was constructed from three to five feet deep, at any 

 and all points in the States of New England, New York, New Jer- 

 sey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, Wis- 

 consin, Minnesota and throughout the Canadas, Nova Scotia and 

 New Brunswick, dropping the waters of autumn rains so deeply 

 down as to hold them during winter at spring water temperature, 

 they would be found to melt the snows at bottom and hold the 

 trenches nearly or quite full of pure spring water during every day 

 of winter. 



In no particular do we propose to leave demonstration incomplete. 

 The following article from the Chicago Journal tells the story : 



" "When the hair on the heads of the young and rising generation 

 shall have been whitened with age ; when their descendants of the, 

 second generation shall be toddling around their great arm-chairs 

 or begging to be taken on their knees and told some stories of the, 

 to them, mysterious past, the grandparents will, no doubt, on many 

 such occasions recall the winter from which we are just emerging' 

 but w r hich has clung so tenaciously to the lap of spring, and which 

 still seems so unwilling to leave us, and speak of it as the terrible 

 winter of 1884-85, when the thermometer for fully one-third of the 

 whole season remained below zero, and when, during the entire 

 months of January and February, the mercury rose to the freezing 

 points or above on only fifteen occasions; when snow-storms were 

 of almost daily occurrence, and when the regular spring-time of 

 the year had run considerable of its course before the great moun- 

 tains of snow, which had almost hidden the earth, had disappeared 

 from view. It can not even now be gainsaid that the past winter 

 was a pretty tart one. Setting in as it did about the middle of De- 



