WATER IN AGEICULTUEE. 11 



general measure of his progress from the lowest barbarism \ip to 

 that perfect mental and moral stature which is symbolized by 

 Copernicus, Galileo, Shakespeare, Milton, and Newton. 



Modern Agriculture is an art — or rather a circle of arts — based 

 upon Natural Science, which is a methodical exposition of Divine 

 Law. The savage is Nature's thrall, whom she scorches, freezes, 

 starves, drowns, as her caprice may dictat*^. He lives in constant 

 dread of her frosts, her tornadoes, her lightnings. Science teaches 

 his civilized successor to turn her wildest eccentricities to his own 

 use and profit. Her floods and gales saw his timber and gi^ind his 

 grain ; in time, they will chop his trees, speed his plow, and till his 

 crops as well. Science transforms and exalts him from the slave 

 into the master of the elements. If he does not yet harness the 

 electric fluid to his plow, his boat, his wagon, and make it the 

 most docile and useful of his servants, it is because he is still but 

 little advanced from barbarism. Essentially, the lightning gar- 

 nered in a summer cloud should be as much at his command and 

 as subservient to his needs as the water that refreshes his thirsty 

 fields and starts his hitherto lifeless wheels. 



Nowhere has human stolidity been more forcibly demonstrated 

 than in the average farmer's bygone dealings with water. This 

 mobile, subtle fluid, which will voluntarily travel wherever you 

 will, if you give it an inch of descent per mile, ought to have long 

 since been absolutely and everywhere at the beck and call of every 

 cultivator. And yet, I have stood beside a corn-field parched and 

 withering from drouth, while a mill-stream danced and braAvled 

 right through its center, falling twenty feet in a hundred rods, yet 

 moistening the roots of no plants but those of the two rows next its 

 bed on either side, while three days' work of two men would have 

 dammed and diverted its waters so that four or five acres of the com 

 would have been unrolled and set to growing again by their in- 

 fluence. Whoever travels with open eyes may note a thousand 

 such opportunities in almost any State — a hundred or more in 

 nearly every County. 



With Grass, the facility and advantage of Irrigation are still more 

 obvious. I visited last Summer the region of the White Mountains 

 — Coos, the northernmost county of New-Hampshire, That dis- 

 trict is cold, mountainous, rugged, rocky, with a strong, granitic 

 soil, which does not lend itself easily to tillage, but which is very 

 natural to grass. And, so numerous are the horses required for the use 



