LOUISIANA AND HER LEVEES. 7 



Steam tillage of growing crops, being a nicer, more critical opera- 

 tion, will be confined to daylight. But the Autumn is here the dry 

 season, therefore most favorable to plowing ; and he realizes an 

 immense advantage in this : Throughout the cane-cutting months 

 of October and November, when all the mules on a plantation are 

 overworked at hauling up cut Cane from the fields to the sugar- 

 house, so that plowing with animals is impossible, he will have his 

 plowing machinery constantly at work, doing him most excellent 

 service in preparing for next year's crop, 



I am quite aware that this letter will not convey any clear idea 

 either of the machinery or the processes employed in Steam Plowing 

 and Tillage. No sensible man expects to be made acquainted with 

 these otherwise than by personal and careful observation. If I have 

 given any tolerable idea of the results achieved, their cost and their 

 value, I have done all I purposed. I close, then, with an avowal of 

 my confident belief that Mr. Eflfingham Lawrence has rendered an 

 immense service to American Agriculture, especially that of the 

 Prairie States, by demonstrating the benefits not merely of Steam 

 Plowing but of subsequent Steam Tillage, and that the day is not 

 remote wherein the " barrens " of Long Island and New Jersey, the 

 rich intervales of the Connecticut and the Susquehanna, will be 

 profitably plowed and tilled to a depth of twenty-four to thirty 

 inches by Steam Power, and that far larger and surer crops than those 

 of the past will therefrom be realized. H. G. 



THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI AND THE GULF. 



[editorial correspondence of the tribune.] 



Houston, Texas, May 20. — I presume there is no richer soil 

 on earth than that formed by the annual overflow of its banks by 

 the mighty Mississippi. That inundation has been checked, not 

 precluded, by the artificial Levees, which, though locally advan- 

 tageous, seem to me, on a broader view, mistaken. The current 

 of the Father of Waters is, in the main, so resistless when the 

 river is at a high stage, and is so surcharged with the richest eai-th, 

 that it has only to be modified, not arrested, to induce it to com- 

 mence a deposit of fertilizing sediment. Now, if its banks were so 

 adjusted that it would at once overflow them along its whole course, 

 from Cairo to the Balize, it could never rise six inches above them, 



