WINDMILLS AND PUMPS. 353 



quantity of water and deliver it on the surface in the 

 simplest, cheapest, and most efficient way. To better 

 accomplish this task, the records of all ages in the 

 ancient art of irrigation have been gleaned afresh for 

 new ideas of things that are old. Not content with 

 modern mechanism and with the steam-engine of our 

 day, they have gone back to the more simple contriv- 

 ances of an earlier period. The old water-wheel, with 

 its skin buckets, rough pin gearing and long sweep, 

 propelled by oxen, has been modernized. Pharaoh 

 himself, if alive again, would admit that western irri- 

 gators have made great improvements on the old water- 

 wheels of his realm. 



Draft-horses have replaced the Egyptian oxen, and 

 well-designed steel buckets attached to a revolving 

 chain have reduced the fri(5lion of the roughly made 

 wooden gearing. The old-fashioned Dutch windmills, 

 which our grandfathers considered veritable Eiffel 

 towers and which still dot the landscape of New Eng- 

 land, only interest the artist now. The genius of the 

 American machinist and engineer have made the skel- 

 eton of the modern wind-engine to appear like reeds, 

 yet as strong as steel, and the twenty-foot wheels are 

 as readily adjusted as an eagle's wing. The Hfting 

 capacity of the windmills is of necessity small, but 

 when one considers the tens of thousands in use, and 

 the small cost of operation and maintenance, the work 

 they perform is enormous. A mill having a ten-foot 

 wheel and exposed to a wind of ten miles an hour will 

 produce one-eighth of a horse-power, while a twenty- 

 two foot wheel in the same wind would produce one 

 horse-power. In other words, if there was no loss by 



