ARTESIAN WATER IN N. S. WALES. 95 



nothing to maximum. The purity of this artesian supply for 

 domestic purposes and its healthfulness gave Fort Worth an 

 enviable superiority which her rival cities were not slow to 

 imitate, and as a result of her success nearly every city and village 

 in the grand and Black Prairie Region and in fact throughout 

 the State, made artesian experiments. A few of these were put 

 down in unfavourable locations and were failures, but hundreds 

 more were successful, and to-day most of the cities of the State, 

 which before this artesian epoch were without good water, are 

 supplied with abundance. . . The industrial uses to which 

 these waters are at present put are many. At Waco hundreds 

 of sewing machines in clothing factories, electric motors, wood- 

 working machinery and other small industries, are run by the 

 pressure of wells without wasting the water, by the use of small 

 and powerful Californian wheels. When the high cost of fuel in 

 Texas is considered, this use of artesian water becomes a most 

 important factor. The greatest use of this water at present is 

 the fact that it brings to hitherto poorly watered farming and 

 grazing lands an abundant supply of water for domestic and stock 

 purposes, making small farms of 100 acres or less possible, where 

 until recently subdivisions of large bodies of land or ranches were 

 impossible. . . . The value of these wells for irrigation has 

 been demonstrated by the modest farmers of the Paluxy Valley, 

 who by their own humble methods, and without previous know- 

 ledge of the subject, are now quadrupling the yield of cotton and 

 grain. A farmer at Paluxy stated that his ten acres of cotton, 

 yielding nearly two bales of five hundred pounds each to the acre 

 was far more profitable and easily worked than one hundred acres 

 which he had until recently cultivated in Alabama. 



"The largest and most prosperous city in Texas, San Antonio, 

 is built upon and about an irrigation enterprise, which has most 

 profitably and successfully utilized their underground waters for 

 nearly three hundred years, affording occupation for all the mission 

 settlements in the past, supporting hundreds of gardens at present 

 and destined to be of great value in the future." 



