12 ADDRESS TO TEXAS FAKISIEES. 



of its many Summer visitors, that Hay is always worth $20 per 

 ton, and, in Winters following dry Summers and Autumns like the 

 last, considerably more. It is a country of abundant springs and 

 rills, and dancing, laughing streams, which fall so rapidly as to 

 make Irrigation an obvious and profitable resort. I am quite sure 

 that ten thousand acres of grass land in that county might be am- 

 ply irrigated, by dams and reservoirs and shallow ditches, at an aver- 

 age cost of $20 per acre, and with an average increase in their annual 

 product of one ton of good hay per acre, worth at least $10 as it 

 stands in the field ready for the scythe of the mower. Here would 

 be fifty per cent, annual return for the investment ; and its value 

 is likely to increase rather than diminish. And yet, I doubt that 

 there are one hundred acres of that covmty irrigated : and what 

 wonder, since the farmers of the older and richer counties south of 

 it, whose fields have been cultivated from one to two centuries, 

 have not yet realized the thriftlessness and waste of letting rills 

 and brooks dance idly by and through the crops that are perishing 

 from thirst ? While the rich valleys of the Connecticut and Ken- 

 nebec, which have for generations been tilled by fanners exception- 

 ably Avealthy and intelligent, exhibit not an acre irrigated to every 

 thousand left to depend for water on the caprice of the often scorch- 

 ing, withering skies, what can we reasonably expect of newer, ruder, 

 poorer communities ? 



If Irrigation were a novelty. Conservatism might shake its head 

 gravely, doubtingly, thereat,without exposing its emptiness of brains. 

 But in fact the artificial application of water to secure and increase 

 production is older than the Plow — older than authentic History. 

 Nattire gave the example and the broadest possible hint in the 

 valley of the lower Nile ; Italy borrowed and improved upon the 

 suggestion in the early morn of Christendom, if not earlier; and 

 the Spaniards brought the art to this country before the Pilgrims 

 built their huts around Plymovith Rock. How came it that lessons 

 so striking and so palpable can have so long been defied by a people 

 so alert and eager for profit as ours ? 



I believe the time is at hand when not only will streams be 

 generally utilized to moisten adjacent fields, and thus largely increase 

 ■their product, but when eveiy thirsty, arid plain will have its bounte- 

 ous well, with a wind-mill erected over it to pump its contents auto- 

 matically, at little cost, into a reservoir where, after being warmed 

 by the sun, and perhaps fertilized, they will be drawn away in 



