30 TILE DBAINAG& 



twice the total cost of drainage, besides the increased growth of 

 the apple-trees, and a heavy crop of wheat straw, and as 

 grand a crop of clover and timothy the next year as I ever 

 saw. 



Encouraged by these results, and by others later, I went 

 on from year to year increasing the area of thoroughly tiled 

 land, until now I have, as already stated, nearly 65 acres of 

 my total 115, drained with about 15 miles of laterals and the 

 necessary mains. 



My very able friend, Mr. B. F. Johnson, of Champaign Co., 

 Illinois, has had much to say for the past ten years in the 

 various agricultural papers for which he has written, of the 

 evil effects of tile drainage in Illinois, especially upon or- 

 chards, and in increasing the liability to drouth and flood. 

 On these last points, drouth and flood, I have already spoken 

 quite fully in the tenth and eleventh numbers of the preced- 

 ing chapter. As to general crops and orchards, I have trav- 

 eled, observed, and inquired quite extensively in nearly all 

 the States of the Union, and have never seen or heard of ill 

 effects of drainage except from Mr. Johnson, and he never 

 offered any ocular or other demonstration. It may be and 

 doubtless is true, as he states, that drouth has increased in 

 Illinois during the past three or four years, and yet the fact 

 be due to other causes than tile drainage. Drouth has also 

 increased during the same period in Central and Western 

 Iowa, where I lived the past five years nearly ; but it can 

 not have been caused by tile drainage, for probably not one 

 per cent of the total area there has been tiled. Then, too; as to 

 its increasing floods, the Ohio Kiver floods are oftenest quot- 

 ed. In the first place, the floods have not increased, as the 

 statistics of 50 years show; and in the second place, not one- 

 tenth of one per cent of the hilly water-shed that causes floods 

 in the Ohio River has ever heard of tile drainage. It is simply 

 the old fault in logic, of assigning wrong causes. The logi- 

 cians call it the fallacy of "postea, ergo propter," or " after- 

 ward, therefore because of." It rains after the barometer 



