$4 FLOOD LANDS AND WATER SUPPLY. 



from boyhood, and carry your memory back as 

 far as you can. Has any one of them increased 

 in volume during the past fifteen or twenty 

 years? Has anyone suffered less than a twenty 

 per cent, shrinkage? 



On either side of the railway line, one can 

 note the changed and changing features of 

 country. The swamp of a dozen years ago, 

 where clumps of marsh marigold stood out like 

 brass headed nails from the dull dark earth 

 visible half a mile away, has had a deep 

 herring bone drain cut through it, which con- 

 ducts the old water storage, gallon by gallon 

 along the edge of the lower field, into a ditch; 

 and ultimately into a brook. These same 

 drains will now serve to conduct the very next 

 shower of rain down the same well worn 

 channel, and all within half an hour; whereas 

 nature had been accustomed to something more 

 like the pace of a glacier. 



It would seem as though some harm to 

 agriculture must result later on if this drainage 

 is continued in so wholesale and systematic a 

 manner. 



We can only have cattle upon a thousand 

 hills, provided we have streams in a hundred 

 valleys. 



These streams too, if they are never to fail, 

 must look to waters held in solution in meadows 

 and swamps waters which are given up to the 

 streams so slowly and grudgingly, that the 

 fierce months of a dry summer have completed 

 their season before the last drop has percolated 



