214 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



doing, tiles, even at a cost of twenty or twenty-two dollars a 

 thousand for two-inch tiles, rather than undertake to use stone. 

 There is a great deal of difficulty in working on that land with 

 stone. In the first place, you have your stone to haul there. 

 "Well, four oxen, with a cart, can carry but a very small quan- 

 tity of stone on an ordinary undrained meadow. It will take 

 several cart-loads to make even one rod of stone drain in almost 

 any meadow ; whereas, with a wheelbarrow, you can carry tiles 

 enougli to lay six or seven rods. The tiles weigh about three 

 pounds apiece, and one hundred of them will go a hundred 

 feet. Ordinarily, you do not have stone on these meadows. 

 You may have it in the neighborhood, as Mr. Flint says, but all 

 land does not afford you stone on the surface. 



A Member. How deep would you lay them ? 



Mr. French, I would lay them four feet deep, if I could 

 get them in. That is one thing that it is almost impossible to 

 make farmers believe, or practise ; and for this reason, that 

 they will try draining by laying their drains two feet deep, and 

 they say they drain the land enough, for no man ever laid a 

 drain through a piece of land that he did not see the benefit of 

 it. If he does not go deeper than a foot and a half, he is 

 amazed to see the improvement he has made ; if two and a half, 

 he thinks that is enough. That is one point that has been 

 dwelt upon very much by English engineers, and there is but 

 one opinion about it in England. I think the best drainage 

 engineers all advise, as a general rule, the putting of tiles four 

 feet deep, if you can get a fall that will carry the water away. 

 The advantage is, not that you want to carry the water off four 

 feet below the surface, because the crops would grow well 

 enough if you kept it two feet below the surface, but this is the 

 advantage : we have sometimes a rain-fall of three, four or five 

 inches in twenty-four hours ; it is not an uncommon thing to 

 have two or three inches, and I think we have had, in one 

 instance between five and six inches within twenty-four hours. 

 In England, one inch is an extraordinary rain-fall. We have 

 twice as much rain as they do. In the middle counties, they 

 have twenty inches ; we have forty and forty-two. Now, sup- 

 pose you have a piece of land in which you have laid tiles four 

 feet deep. In a dry time, all the water that will run off has 

 settled down to that depth. After a long drought, there comes 



