derable genius, but he had the misfortune to be illiterate, and to find a very inefficient exponent of his opinions, and of the principles on which he conducted his works, in John Johnstone. Every one who reads the work, which is popularly called Elkington on Draining, should be aware, that it is not Joseph who thinks and speaks therein, but John who tells his readers what, according to his ideas, Joseph would have thought and spoken. In one portion of the book, entitled On Hollow and Surface Draining in general,' which is discussed in nineteen sections, Johnstone teaches avowedly in his own person, his first sentence being, 'This is a part of the draining system not coming within the limits of Mr. Elkington's practice.' It is enough to say that these nineteen sections do not contain a single suggestion of any value to a modern drainer. A reader who has some previous acquaintance with the subject will get a general idea of Elkington's discovery and method from the earlier portion of the book, though, unless he has seen some of Elkington's work, he will not therefrom form an adequate opinion of his sagacity. Johnstone, measured by general capacity, is a very shallow drainer. He delights in exceptional cases, of which he may have met with some, but of which we suspect the great majority to be the products of his own ingenuity, and to be put forward with a view to display the ability with which he could encounter them. We shall pass by such cases altogether. No doubt they are numerous in the aggregate; but they form a very small per centage of the work of draining which has to be done or redone in Great Britain. They are moreover for the most part too complicated to be quite understood without actual inspection, too varied for useful classification, and must be left to the skill and sagacity of the operator. A slight modification of Johnstone's best and simplest plan, with a few sentences of explanation, will sufficiently elucidate Elkington's mystery, and will comprehend the case of all simple superficial springs. Perhaps in agricultural Britain no formation is more common than moderate elevations of pervious material, such as chalk, gravel, and imperfect stone or rock of various kinds, resting upon more horizontal beds of clay or other material less pervious than themselves, and at their inferior edge overlapped by it. For this overlap geological reasons are given, into which we cannot now enter. In order to make our explanation simple, we use the words gravel and clay as generic for pervious and impervious material. Our drawing is an attempt to combine plan and section, which will probably be sufficiently illustrative. From A to T is the overlap, which is in fact a dam holding up the water in the gravel. In this dam there is a weak place at S, through which water issues permanently (a superficial spring),

and

and runs over the surface from S to O. This issue has a tendency to lower the water in the gravel to the line Mm. But when continued rains overpower this issue, the water in the gravel rises to the line A a, and meeting with no impediment at the point A, it flows over the surface between A and S. In addi

tion to these more decided outlets, the water is probably constantly squeezing in a slow way through the whole dam. Elkington undertakes to drain the surface from A to O. He cuts a drain from O to B, and then he puts down a borehole, an Artesian well from B to Z. His hole enters the tail of the gravel; the water contained therein rises up it; and the tendency of this new outlet is to lower the water to the line Bb. If so lowered, it is manifest that it can no longer overflow at A or at S, and the surface from A to O is drained so far as the springs are concerned. Though our section can only represent one spring and one summit overflow, it is manifest that however long the horizontal line of junction between the gravel and clay may be, however numerous the weak places (springs) in the overlap or dam, and the summit overflows, they will all be stopped, provided they lie at a higher level than the line Bb. If Elkington had driven his drain forward from B to n, he would at least equally have attained his object; but the borehole was less expensive. He escapes the deepest and most costly portion of his drain. At x he might have bored to the centre of the earth without ever releasing the water in this gravel. His whole success, therefore, depended on his sagacity in hitting the point Z.-Another simple and very common case, first successfully treated by Elkington, is illustrated by our second drawing. Between gravel hills lies a dishshaped bed of clay, the gravel being continuous under the dish. Springs overflow at A and B, and wet the surface from A to O and from B to O. OD is a drain 4 or 5 feet deep, and having an adequate outlet. DZ a borehole. The water in the gravel rises from Z to D, and is lowered to the level Dm and D n. Of course it ceases to flow over at A and B. If Elkington's

VOL. LXXXVI. NO. CLXXI.

H

heart

heart had failed him when he reached x, he would have done no All his success depends on his reaching Z, however

good.

Elkington was a discoverer.

deep it may lie. We do not at all believe that his discoveries hinged on the accident that the shepherd walked across the field with a crow-bar in his hand. When he forced down that crow-bar he had more in his head than was ever dreamed of in Johnstone's philosophy. Such accidents do not happen to ordinary men. Elkington's subsequent use of his discovery, in which no one has yet excelled him, warrants our supposition that the discovery was not accidental. He was not one of those prophets who are without honour in their own country; he created an immense sensation, and received a parliamentary grant of one thousand pounds. One writer compares his auger to Moses's rod, and Arthur Young speculates, whether, though worthy to be rewarded by millers on one side of the hill for increasing their stream, he was not liable to an action by those on the other for diminishing theirs. He appears to have generally used stones as a conduit, but occasionally a sort of drain-brick, the pattern of which came from France. The duty was not then taken off such materials, and formed a sore impediment to their use and improvement.

After Elkington, we find no notability in draining till we come to Smith of Deanston, and his name at once introduces us to modern practice and modern controversy. We have now to deal with the case of lands which get rid of the rain which falls upon them so slowly, that it becomes either an hindrance to fertility, or an inconvenience to agriculture, or both. This evil is often, perhaps oftener than not, complicated with an almost imperceptible oozing of bottom-water squeezed through the earth by the pressure of superincumbent subterranean reservoirs, existing in higher grounds, situated sometimes at a considerable distance. But the surface-water is the main point, and the bottom-water, if we may

SO

so call it, is amenable to the same treatment, and, except in one occasional case,* will be removed by the same means. But we can get on no farther without definitions; and here we are in a difficulty. In England everybody farms. Prince Albert farms; the Lord Chancellor and the Attorney-General farm; the Duke farms; Admiral Sir Charles Napier farms; Sir Benjamin Brodie farms; the Speaker farms; the ex-Premier farms; we cannot speak so positively of Lord John Russell, though it is not unlikely that he may have tried his hand when suing the Huntingdonshire constituency in former days. Nor must we omit that Dean Buckland and Lord Brougham are shining lights at agricultural gatherings. We hope we have the honour to be addressing all or some of these, and to them and to other practical agriculturists we fear we shall appear to be tediously elementary. But we must crave their indulgence, because we hope that we are addressing also a host of agriculturists in anticipation; men who, when they deposit their first golden nest-egg, the produce of their first brief, or fee, or quarterly bill, or venture, or even perhaps an acknowledgment which has reached them in consideration of a leading article, or a contribution to a review, destine the produce of the nest, when it has reached its complement, to the purchase of an estate; and are quite determined that the first solace of their 'otium cum dignitate' shall be to drain it: Monstrari digito prætereuntium,' as an improving landed proprietor. Το these aspirations we desire to administer, and we hope to make the objects and practice of modern draining patent to the most inexperienced mind. This must be our apology. The nomenclature of draining is indefinite, because the ideas of those who have practised the art have been confused. Probably no other art ever had so long an infancy. In the word soil, we include, for our present purpose, the whole depth to which land is treated in our operations. All our readers will have heard of soils open and stiff-pervious or permeable, and impervious-porous and retentive. We mean to select for use the last pair of these epithets. By porous soils we mean those which, in their natural state, are capable of filtering through themselves all or the greater part of the rain which falls upon them. By retentive soils we mean those

* When we said that no one had yet excelled Elkington, we were speaking of the treatment of mere springs. In the complicated case to which our text refers, Mr. Parkes has often and most skilfully combined his own more peculiar practice with Elkington's discovery removing the water from above by parallel thorough-drains, and giving to that which is squeezed up from below an easy access to the same drains by boreholes. This combination would however be useless in the hands of a man who did not inherit somewhat of the old prophet's sagacity. He appears to have dropped his mantle on a man of his own county. Mr. Parkes has introduced a great improvement by securely piping down his boreholes, and by connecting those perpendicular pipes with the pipes in his drain.

H 2

which,

which, in their natural state, retain the whole or the greater part of the rain which falls upon them, until it has run off by superficial discharge, or has been exhausted by evaporation. Of the terms cut, trench, and drain we shall use exclusively the latter; and as the word sough or surf has been popularly extended beyond its original meaning, which was simply the artificial aperture left in the refilled drain for the passage of the water, we shall drop that word altogether, and substitute the word conduit. Our predecessors have used almost indifferently the phrases surfacedraining, hollow-draining, the frequent-drain-system, furrowdraining, and thorough-draining. Of these we shall select the last, as best descriptive of our object. We call that thorough draining which assimilates retentive soils to porous to this extent, that it enables them to filter through themselves to the depth of the drains all the rain which falls upon their surface; or if that object cannot be entirely attained, the thoroughness of the draining varies inversely as the quantity of water got rid of by other means. By water of drainage we mean all water existing among the particles of soil beyond that which they are able to retain by attraction. The water of drainage in any soil will stand at a level like any other dammed up water. In order to avoid circumlocution, we shall ask leave to call this level the water-table. In using the word attraction, we shall drop capillary, which is a favourite with writers on draining. We drop it because it conveys no definite idea to our mind as connected with particles of soil; because attraction is perfectly intelligible; and because every one may, by the simplest experiments, and the use of his own eyes, convince himself that particles of soil have an attraction for water so strong as to overcome to a certain extent the force of gravity.

Imperfect attempts at thorough-draining were probably first made in the southern counties of England. The conduit was usually formed of thorns or other twigs, the cuttings of the hedges, covered with straw. In Leicestershire nearly a century ago, and perhaps earlier, a conduit was formed in clay at the bottom of the drain by a super-imposed turf (locally called clod-soughing); and the practice is not quite exploded in that and other counties, which are backward in their agriculture. Attempts, moreover, were made in various parts of England to form a conduit by means of a moleplough. This instrument had a great but very transient reputation. Smith of Deanston was therefore by no means the author of thorough-draining, but he saw much more clearly than any of his predecessors the benefits to be derived from it, and he has the high merit of having brought them prominently before the public. No doubt whatever can exist that Mr. Smith gave the first effectual impulse to the practice, and to that extent his name is

justly