Triinli Drainage. 
9 
is necessary to a more effective husbandry in our present OAcr- 
watered districts, and compatible with better navigation and 
increased water-power; so that all classes of the community have 
an indiu-ement to aid the great work in the way I shall endeavour 
to delineate and recommend. Any attempt at estimating the 
number of acres actually subject to inundations — to say nothing 
of the immense area beside which is so badly provided for as to 
have its drain-water level with the brinks of its ditches during 
three months of the year, and of which every railway traveller 
witnesses abundant specimens — would probably be many thou- 
sands of acres beside the truth ; but the generality of the floods 
is sufficiently indicative of the extent of the mischief. 
The preliminary " heads," tabulated by the Society for the 
guidance of competing Essayists, I shall discuss rather briefly, 
in order to afford greater scope for wrestling with the main 
difficulties of the question involved in the complicated nature of 
the works required, and in the interference of drainers with 
other rights and interests than those of agriculture. 
1. Effect of Rivers and Brooks in benefiting contiguous Grass- 
Land by occasional icinter flooding, and injuring it by too 
great protraction of flood. 
The bulky harvests of hay, with their succeeding aftermaths 
of fresh and abundant pasturage, yielded by the self-flooded 
meadows of our principal rivers, doubtless led our early im- 
provers to imitate, with all the perfection of art, what they per- 
ceived to be advantageously performed in some places by uncon- 
trolled nature; and we now find that, in proportionas naturally over- 
flowed meadows are situated in accordance with the conditionsmost 
expedient in such as are artificially irrigated, the spontaneous pi'o- 
duce will be of greater or less value. Whether from the presence of 
fertilizing sediment, including the sewerage of towns, or chemical 
agents, such as ammonia, causing our rivers to act as liquid 
manure — whether from their action in dissolving and preparing 
in the soil substances required by plants ; their operation in 
conveying nutriment to, and excreted matters from, the roots of 
grasses ; or their influence upon the temperature and other 
conditions of ground lying undisturbed and uncultivated ; or 
from a combination of these operations — it is certain that occa- 
sional tvintcr fioodings do enrich onr river meadoios, raising from 
them, without any outlay of capital in manure or labour on the 
part of the occupier, considerable stores of hay, so valuable to 
the upland arable farms with which «uch meadows are usually 
coupled in tenancy, and in some years commanding a rental of 
21. to 3/. per acre. But as well may an unfortunate Fen farmer 
expect from his wind-engine a dryness equal to that of a neigh- 
