TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION M. 655 
It has incidentally been shown that in order to obtain a probable error of less 
than 3 per cent. of the average of any sample it is necessary to take 160 measure- 
ments of that sample. 
(4) There is a large variation in the range of the weights of the F, fleeces. 
(5) The F, generation are also intermediate as regards the number of waves 
per inch. 
7. Size Inheritance in Poultry. By P. G. Batey. 
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19. 
Joint Discussion with Section G on Irrigation. 
(i.) Irrigation Works in Italy.!. By Professor Lurar Luiae1, D.Sc., 
M.Inst.C.H., President, Italian Society of Civil Engineers. 
The average tourist who visits Italy and admires the splendid orange- 
groves round Sicily and Calabria, the industrial flower-gardens of the Ligurian 
Riviera, the luxurious vegetable-gardens and orchards of Tuscany and Campania, 
or the extensive green meadows of exuberant trefoil and lucerne of Lombardy 
and Lower Piedmont—if he has any tinge of poetry in his veins—will be apt to 
raise a hymn of praise to Providence for bestowing upon Italy such great 
blessings, and forget the industry of its inhabitants accused of the sins of ‘ dolce 
far niente.’ 
And truly Italy has been greatly favoured by a mild climate with plenty 
of sunshine—although even in excess in some parts; but beyond this, Providence 
has not done much more than for any other nation of Southern Europe, if it 
were not that it has also given to Italy a very hardy race of people, full of 
resources, very thrifty, content with little, and ready to till the land cheerfully 
from dawn to dusk in the hope of getting good crops, notwithstanding the 
numerous drawbacks of a rather poor soil, of a very irregular rainfall—in excess 
during the winter months, when it causes inundations, and nearly absent for 
five to seven months of the warm season, during which a fierce sun would scorch 
the land and dry up all vegetation if the industry of the Italian farmer did not 
overcome these natural drawbacks by means of a rational system of irrigation. 
And, in fact, the prosperity of agriculture in the regions just mentioned— 
which are the most prosperous in Italy—is due exclusively to the incessant 
work of men who, far from enjoying much ‘ dolce far niente,’ have applied, 
and are extending continually, the art of irrigation, which in Italy dates back 
from the time of the Etruscans, and has reached great perfection in our days. 
Without irrigation, the rich orange-groves, the bountiful orchards and 
vegetable-gardens, which give such valuable products for exportation to Central 
Europe and North America, could not exist, and the land would give but a 
scanty revenue to its owners; but especially the luxurious and extensive meadows 
of the valley of the Po—which are intensely green all the year round, and give 
even seven or eight crops of fodder per year—could not exist, and barely one or 
two cuttings of grass could be raised without the help of irrigation. 
It is the art of the hydraulic engineer and the intelligence and perseverance 
of the agriculturist that, by regulating the natural water-courses, impounding 
the water in reservoirs, or raising it from the subsoil or from the natural 
streams, and then distributing this water intelligently over the land at the 
proper time—that is, by scientific irrigation—have transformed the waste sandy 
plains of Piedmont and Lombardy into the most prosperous meadows of Europe, 
and made the orange-groves around the Tyrrhenian coasts so plentiful and beauti- 
ful as to cause Goethe to give to Italy the name of ‘the land where the orange 
blooms.’ 
1 Published in Engineering, September 18, 1914. 
