4 
MEASUREMENT AND DIVISION OF WATER. 
expenditures will make money go farther without wrong¬ 
ing any one. Without measurement the practice is neces¬ 
sarily to give the consumer enough to stop complaint. 
The tendency to improvidence runs to the last consumer, 
for, if the water is not valuable enough to measure care¬ 
fully from the canal, what inducement is there for the 
consumer to prevent waste. With water plentiful, the sys¬ 
tem—or lack of svstem—works without much friction. 
But in time of scarcity it is of great moment that each 
has no more than he is entitled to. If one man gets more 
than his share, some one else gets less. And this often 
means ruin to his crops. 
This bulletin is the result of the study of the measur¬ 
ing devices as seen in Colorado and of those used in Italy. 
It cannot be said that any are free from objection, but 
some are noticeably better than others. On this subject 
the experience of Italy is useful. She has the accumu¬ 
lated experience of 600 years of irrigation; we of thirty. 
While the progress made here in this time by a people 
dependent practically upon native wit for their knowledge 
of irrigation has been marvelous, it is unquestionably 
true that we may learn much from the experience of other 
countries. The laws governing the flow of water, the 
principles involved in distribution and division, are the 
same here as there. We are finding from our experience 
the necessity of laws and regulations which they have 
long had in practice. In other ways our experience is 
likely to be parallel to theirs. The Italian modules have 
been various, but most of them based upon one principle, 
which has been introduced into Colorado under the form 
•of the statute inch. The need for modules being felt be¬ 
fore the rise of hydraulic science, these boxes were based 
upon empirical principles, without the knowledge of the 
flow of water which we now have. That they have been 
used so long with even a fair degree of satisfaction reflects 
