Farm drainage | Page 7

great West, large tracts are found just a little too wet for the best crops of corn and wheat, and the inquiry is anxiously made, how can we be rid of this surplus water.
There is no treatise, English or American, which meets the wants of our people. In England, it is true, land drainage is already reduced to a science; but their system has grown up by degrees, the first principles being now too familiar to be at all discussed, and the points now in controversy there, quite beyond the comprehension of beginners. America wants a treatise which shall be elementary, as well as thorough--that shall teach the alphabet, as well as the transcendentalism, of draining land--that shall tell the man who never saw a drain-tile what thorough drainage is, and shall also suggest to those who have studied the subject in English books only, the differences in climate and soil, in the prices of labor and of products, which must modify our operations.
With some practical experience on his own land, with careful observation in Europe and in America of the details of drainage operations, with a somewhat critical examination of published books and papers on all topics connected with the general subject, the author has endeavored to turn the leisure hours of a laborious professional life to some account for the farmer. Although, as the lawyers say, the "presumptions" are, perhaps, strongly against the idea, yet a professional man may understand practical farming. The profession of the law has made some valuable contributions to agricultural literature. Sir Anthony Fitzherbert, author of the "Boke of Husbandrie," published in 1523, was Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and, as he says, an "experyenced farmer of more than 40 years." The author of that charming little book, "Talpa," it is said, is also a lawyer, and there is such wisdom in the idea, so well expressed by Emerson as a fact, that we commend it by way of consolation to men of all the learned professions: "All of us keep the farm in reserve, as an asylum where to hide our poverty and our solitude, if we do not succeed in society."
Besides the prejudice against what is foreign, we meet everywhere the prejudice against what is new, though far less in this country than in England. "No longer ago than 1835," says the Quarterly Review, "Sir Robert Peel presented a Farmers' Club, at Tamworth, with two iron plows of the best construction. On his next visit, the old plows, with the wooden mould-boards, were again at work. 'Sir,' said a member of the club, 'we tried the iron, and we be all of one mind, that they make the weeds grow!'"
American farmers have no such ignorant prejudice as this. They err rather by having too much faith in themselves, than by having too little in the idea of progress, and will be more likely to "go ahead" in the wrong direction, than to remain quiet in their old position.
CHAPTER II.
HISTORY OF THE ART OF DRAINING.
Draining as Old as the Deluge.--Roman Authors.--Walter Bligh in 1650.--No thorough drainage till Smith of Deanston.--No mention of tiles in the "Compleat Body of Husbandry," 1758.--Tiles found 100 years old.--Elkington's System.--Johnstone's Puns and Peripatetics.--Draining Springs.--Bletonism, or the Faculty of Perceiving Subterranean Water.--Deanston System.--Views of Mr. Parkes.--Keythorpe System.--Wharncliffe System.--Introduction of tiles into America.--John Johnston, and Mr. Delafield, of New York.
The art of removing superfluous water from land, must be as ancient as the art of cultivation; and from the time when Noah and his family anxiously watched the subsiding of the waters into their appropriate channels, to the present, men must have felt the ill effects of too much water, and adopted means more or less effective, to remove it.
The Roman writers upon agriculture, Cato, Columella, and Pliny, all mention draining, and some of them give minute directions for forming drains with stones, branches of trees, and straw. Palladius, in his De Aqu? Ductibus, mentions earthen-ware tubes, used however for aqueducts, rather for conveying water from place to place, than for draining lands for agriculture.
Nothing, however, like the systematic drainage of the present day, seems to have been conceived of in England, until about 1650, when Captain Walter Bligh published a work, which is interesting, as embodying and boldly advocating the theory of deep-drainage as applied by him to water-meadows and swamps, and as applicable to the drainage of all other moist lands.
We give from the 7th volume of the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society, in the language of that eminent advocate of deep-drainage, Josiah Parkes, an account of this rare book, and of the principles which it advocates, as a fitting introduction to the more modern and more perfect system of thorough drainage:
"The author of this work was a Captain Walter Bligh, signing himself, 'A Lover of