GENERAL NOTES 15 



Europe often support their families from shallow, 

 artificial ponds of ridiculously small dimensions. 



How many tillable acres have we in America that 

 can compare favorably as to income with Maryland 

 musquash leaseholds with delicious musquash meat 

 now selling at thirty cents per pound and skins at 

 more than three dollars each? Some one will reply 

 that the present market price for musquash meat 

 and fur is a war price, but so is the present cost of 

 beef and wheat. How many tillable acres bring 

 returns like the shallow waters of terrapin breeders ? 

 Wild-fowl breeders are already entering their pro- 

 tests against reclamation projects. The very word 

 "reclamation" is a joke when we have so many mil- 

 lions of acres of tillable land that is wasted or im- 

 properly employed and when two or three kinds of 

 wet land products can be profitably raised at one 

 time upon one wet acre water nut crops already 

 being standard food crops abroad. 



Irrigation projects in some localities may be quite 

 as untimely as drainage projects in this period of 

 our own history. Irrigated land will wear out pre- 

 cisely like other land and we are simply postponing 

 the day when first rate agriculture will prevail. First 

 rate agriculture will consist in raising forty bushels 

 of wheat to the acre upon eight-acre land as is done 

 at Rothamsted in England. Crops grown upon irri- 

 gated or drained land belong to second-class agricul- 

 ture and first-class engineering. The farmer who 

 boasts of his great crops raised so easily is the 



