SECRETARY'S REPORT. 211 



. DRAINAGE. 



Drainage, as applied to agriculture, presents much too broad 

 a field to be treated by your Committee in the narrow limits 

 allowed them. The various able treatises, too, .which have 

 appeared within the last fifteen years, have so exhausted this 

 important subject, that it would tax the ingenuity of the most 

 thorough of thorovgh-dramers to say anything new to the farm- 

 ers of Massachusetts, not one of whom but has, through his 

 agricultural books and journals, become familiar with the aston- 

 ishing and instructive facts developed by this most interesting 

 science. 



All know that the cause of coldness in retentive soil is the 

 removal of the water of drainage by evaporation, and that ,the 

 object of drainage is to render such soils warm, like those that 

 are porous, by drawing the water down through the soil to the 

 drain, instead of compelling its escape by evaporation ; that in 

 all soils the existence of the water-table nearer than four feet 

 from the surface is prejudicial to vegetation, and that a system 

 of drains laid at that depth must, in the same n^easure, reduce 

 the level of the water-table ; that roots of plants and trees 

 cannot flourish in stagnant water or stagnant air, any more than 

 man or fish can live in such elements ; that warmth, too, is 

 one of the chief elements in the fertility of the soil, and that 

 stagnation or non-drainage deprives it of warmth ; that the 

 water which exudes from the drain is not the summer rain 

 which has just fallen, but the cold water of drainage, which the 

 pressure of the former drives out to give place to its fruitful and 

 life-giving drops, which, as they descend, bearing with them into 

 the soil the summer air, are, after being robbed of all their ferti- 

 lizing gases, in their turn expelled by those which next fall ; 

 and that thorough-draining often adds a month to the season by 

 drying the soil in the spring and delaying the frost in the 

 autumn. 



In an admirable paper by the well-known agricultural engi- 

 neer, Mr. T. Bailey Denton, there is a graphic description of the 

 chemical effect of thorough-draining. He says : " Every one 

 must have observed how our cultivated plants, our crops and 

 trees, dislike stagnant water, and how their roots travel along 

 its surface, underground, directly they reach it. The existence 

 of stagnant water implies the absence of air, which is an essen- 



