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ORIGIN OF IRRIGATION. 
and created for itself the arts of social life.* The improve¬ 
ments of the savage races whose history we can distinctly trace 
are borrowed and imitative, and our theories as to the origin 
and natural development of industrial art are conjectural. Of 
course, the relative antiquity of particular branches of human 
industry depends much upon the natural character of soil, cli¬ 
mate, and spontaneous vegetable and animal life in different 
countries; and while the geographical influence of man would, 
under given circumstances, be exerted in one direction, it 
would, under different conditions, act in an opposite or a 
diverging line. I have given some reasons for thinking that 
in the climates to which our attention has been chiefly directed, 
man’s first interference with the natural arrangement and dis¬ 
posal of the waters was in the way of drainage of surface. 
But if we are to judge from existing remains alone, w r e should 
probably conclude that irrigation is older than drainage ; for, 
in the regions regarded by general tradition as the cradle of 
the human race, we find traces of canals evidently constructed 
for the former purpose at a period long preceding the ages of 
which we have any written memorials. There are, in ancient 
Armenia, extensive districts which were already abandoned to 
desolation at the earliest historical epoch, but which, in a yet 
remoter antiquity, had been irrigated by a complicated and 
highly artificial system of canals, the lines of which can still 
be followed; and there are, in all the highlands where the 
sources of the Euphrates rise, in Persia, in Egypt, in India, 
been that excessive dryness is thus produced, and that other soils in the 
neighborhood are sterilized in proportion.” 
* I ought perhaps to except the Mexicans and the Peruvians, whose 
arts and institutions are not yet shown to be historically connected with 
those of any more ancient people. The lamentable destruction of so many 
memorials of these tribes, by the ignorance and bigotry of the so-called 
Christian barbarians who conquered them, has left us much in the dark as 
to many points of their civilization; but they seem to have reached that 
stage where continued progress in knowledge and in power over nature is 
secure, and a few more centuries of independence might have brought 
them to originate for themselves most of the great inventions which the 
last four centuries have bestowed upon man. 
