INTELLECT IN AGRICITLTTTRE. 13 



gentle rills to irrigate acre after aci'e on every side. I believe that 

 even Texas could richly afford to dig and equip a thousand such 

 wells this summer, and many thousands in the course of the next 

 dozen years. Every plain or intervale that slopes gently, imper- 

 ceptibly, to the stream which divides or bounds it, should have its 

 well at the highest coi-ner, with a spacious shallow reservoir by its 

 side, and ditches leading thence to every point whence gravitation 

 would carry the water gently over and through the soil of nearly 

 or quite all its area. Even though that water should shrink until 

 it utterly failed in seasons of severest drouth, the soil would still 

 respond to the freshening influence of the moisture with which it 

 had been charged and saturated during the fervid weeks and months 

 required to dry up its deeper sources. Meantime, the crop woiild 

 be perfected, and the drouth, when it did at last fasten on the iri-i- 

 gated plain, would perforce exhaust itself on the sea.son of Nature's 

 annual sterility and wintry repose. 



In the great i'uture which Science and Human Energy are pre- 

 paring. Artesian wells, bored to depths of a thousand to fifteen 

 hundred feet, will be sunk on every arid plain, and near the head 

 of every capacious valley wherein water is deficient, to enable the 

 strong currents that flow from subjacent mountain or elevated 

 plateau between diverse strata to rivers and seas to rise by 

 gravitation to the surface and fruitfully overspread hundreds of 

 acres, instead of uselessly coursing in darkness beneath. These 

 wells, being costly, will long be comparatively rare ; but the " Staked 

 Plains" of Texas and New-Mexico, with the wide mis-named 

 " Desert " at either foot of the Rocky Mountains, will yet be trans- 

 formed into the verdurous, plenteous feeding-ground of innumer- 

 able cattle and sheep by irrigation, whereto Artesian wells will 

 largely contribute ; one of them subserving the end of many ordi- 

 nary wells, while drawing water from sources beyond the reach of 

 any or all of them. 



Agriculture, as it steadily rises from the low level of barbarism to 

 the commanding altitude of a true civilization, becomes a more and 

 more intellectual calling. The rude pioneer,wrestling stubbornly with 

 the giant forest or the inhospitable marsh, may waste half his time 

 in play or idleness ; but his work, when he does work, is purely mus- 

 cular, making no draft on mental power or culture. His fields are 

 subdued and tilled, his crops produced and secured, almost wholly 

 by dint of the strength in his good right arm. But, for his civilized. 



