VALUE OF IRRIGATION. 159 



ly into a pestilential swamp. Grass is the grand crop of 

 the farm. It is the pivot of our agriculture. It supports 

 all our live stock in one way or another, and is the very 

 basis of our agricultural prosperity. No farmer ever yet had 

 too much of it : and very many are constantly' mourning 

 over the scarcity of it. A large proportion of these have 

 the power in their own hands to double the product of it; 

 by merely conducting such streams, as may be so carried, 

 over the land and spreading the water upon the grass. 

 Water-meadows exist in Europe which have been pro- 

 ducing green forage and hay for centuries, without any ma- 

 nure and no labor except cutting the grass. The growth is 

 anormous. One inch per day during the summer, or 120 

 inches in the aggregate, has been cut from the Rye Grass 

 meadows of Italy; and in England 6 tons of hay per acre 

 is a common yearly product. The water of the streams 

 comes loaded with fertilizing matter which keeps the land 

 increasing in productiveness notwithstanding the large 

 product. 



The largest crops of grain and vegetables on record are 

 now produced in Colorado and some Western Territories, 

 where 10 years ago not a blade of grass grew and no civi- 

 lized human inhabitant had a home. The prevailing sage 

 brush and cactus gave a somber and dreary view to the 

 broad plains, and the wolf chased its prey among the brush, 

 where now the self-binding reaper sings its clattering songs 

 and scatters the golden sheaves; and villages and surround- 

 ing homesteads cover the land. All this is the grand trans- 

 formation worked by the fairy water; one wave of the mag- 

 ic wand, and the stream flows to one side and scatters it- 

 self through thousands of channels amid the smiling ver- 

 dure which has sprung up from the arid barren soil at the 

 touch of the creative, life giving fluid. The fairy is hu- 

 man industry and enterprise and the magic wand is human 

 labor. In another chapter, this subject will be further 

 treated, and some few practical directions given, so far as 

 space will permit, for the practice of this most profitable 

 method of improving soils. 



