EFFECTS OF IRRIGATION ON HEALTH. 
381 
in both Upper and Lower Egypt at twelve hundredths of an 
inch in depth, we have an abstraction of 61,000,000 cnbic 
yards, which—the mean daily delivery of the Nile being in 
ronnd numbers 320,000,000 cubic yards—is nearly one fifth 
of the average quantity of water contributed to the Mediter¬ 
ranean by that river. 
Irrigation, as employed for certain special purposes, in 
Europe and America, is productive of very prejudicial climatic 
effects. I refer particularly to the cultivation of rice in the 
Slave States of the American Union and in Italy. The climate 
of the Southern States is not necessarily unhealthy for the 
white m^n, but he can scarcely sleep a single night in the 
vicinity of the rice grounds without being attacked by a dan¬ 
gerous fever.* The neighborhood of the rice fields is less 
pestilential in Lombardy and Piedmont than in South Caro¬ 
lina and Georgia, but still very insalubrious to both man and 
beast. “ Not only does the population decrease where rice is 
grown,” says Escourrou Milliago, “ but even the flocks are 
attacked by typhus. In the rice grounds, the soil is divided 
into compartments rising in gradual succession to the level of 
the irrigating canal, in order that the water, after having 
flowed one field, may be drawn off to another, and thus a 
single current serve for several compartments, the lowest field, 
of course, still being higher than the ditch which at last drains 
both it and the adjacent soil. This arrangement gives a cer- 
* The cultivation of rice is so prejudicial to health everywhere that 
nothing but the necessities of a dense population can justify the sacrifice 
of life it costs in countries where it is pursued. 
It has been demonstrated by actual experiment, that even in Missis¬ 
sippi, cotton can be advantageously raised by the white man without 
danger to health ; and in fact, a great deal of the cotton brought to the 
Vicksburg market for some years past has been grown exclusively by 
white labor. There is no reason why the cultivation of cotton should be 
a more unhealthy occupation in America than it is in other countries 
where it was never dreamed of as dangerous, and no well-informed 
American, in the Slave States or out of them, believes that the abolition 
of slavery in the South would permanently diminish the cotton crop of 
those States. 
