220 BOARD OP AGRICULTURE. 



As it passes down, the earth, being a great robber, robs the 

 water of all the heat it contains, and keeps it to itself ; so that 

 if you should put a thermometer in where it falls, and find just 

 where it stood, and then go to- the outlet, forty or fifty rods 

 distant, you would find it stands ten degrees colder than when 

 it fell. That warms the land, and drainage enables this rain to 

 penetrate the soil, and therefore it makes cold land warmer. 



I said also that it makes wet land dry. You see that must 

 take place by what has been said already. Water seeks the 

 lowest level all the time, and when a drain is made two, three 

 or four feet below the surface, there .is a level which must be 

 found, and the water percolates that ground until it finds that 

 level, and consequently the land becomes dry. 



I said, in contradistinction from that, that dry land is made 

 wet. How is that done ? When you have drained the water 

 off, your land is dry, and in case of drought, if you make the 

 surface fine, you make it dry ; but if, by means of your 

 machinery or your hoe, you keep the surface fine, you have it 

 continually watered by the atmosphere. We could not live 

 five minutes if the atmosphere was not moist, but it is full of 

 moisture all the time. A great wet blanket, as it were, is 

 imparting its moisture to that fine surface, which receives it 

 into its many million mouths, and passes it along to other 

 mouths ; down it goes, down it goes, continually robbing the 

 atmosphere of its moisture, until it gets down where the earth 

 is a little cooler than the atmosphere, and then it condenses 

 into water. Just exactly as water condenses on the outside of 

 your pitcher on a hot day, when you go to the well and fill it 

 with, cold water, and set it on the table. In a few moments, 

 the outside is covered with drops of water, and you say " it 

 sweats." But there has not a particle of water passed through 

 the pitcher. It is only the colder surface of the pitcher that ' 

 condenses the vapor in the atmosphere into drops, and it trickles 

 down the pitcher, and wets the table-cloth. I think it is just as 

 clear as anything can be, that draining m,akes wet land dry, 

 and dry land wet. 



I believe you can cultivate a piece of land that is thoroughly 

 drained — if it is anything like hard land — at about one-half the 

 cost that you can wet, heavy land. The operations of tilling 



