DRAINAGE. 87 



questions of durability, cost, and availability. The only positive 

 rules applicable to all cases are that the drain should be a covered 

 one, and not an open ditch, and that it should be, w^henever possi- 

 ble, at least three, and better four, feet deep. 



FARM DRAINAGE. 



While it would hardly be fair to say that farmers are more slow 

 than men of other classes to adopt improvements in the methods 

 of their trade, as hardly any other industry has been, within the 

 same time, so completely revolutionized as has farming, in the 

 single item of hay-making, since the introduction of the mowing 

 machine — still there are some improvements whose practical use- 

 fulness, and whose applicability are universally acknowledged, yet 

 which seem to find it hard work to fight their way to general 

 adoption.* 



The drainage of moist land is one of these. We use the ex- 

 pression 7nQist land^ because land which is absolutely wet is either 

 drained or let alone, as a matter of course. Every farmer knows 

 that his swamps must either be made dry (or at least only moist) 

 or must be left to the bulrushes. The far larger part of our cul- 

 tivated farms, which come under the designations " late," 

 " naturally cold," " heavy," " sour," " springy," etc., — the larger 

 part of all our more fertile lands, that is, — are cultivated year after 

 year, under very heavy disadvantages ; their half crops, and the 

 extra labor and "catching" work that they entail, being accepted 

 as a sort of doom from which there is no available means of relief. 



Almost every farmer of such land is ready to admit that it 

 would be better for being drained, but he has got on so long with- 

 out it, and draining is such expensive work, that, having no example 

 for its benefits before his eyes, he " gets on " without it to the 

 end of his days. 



It does seem hard to believe that on solid upland, that only cost 

 fifty dollars an acre in the first instance, and produces fair crops 

 in fair seasons, it will pay to spend from fifty dollars to one hundred 

 dollars an acre more to make it a little dryer, where more of the 

 same sort can be bought at the original price. But exactly this 



