if thou wilt drayne thy land to purpose. I am forced to use repetitions of some things, because of the sutablenesse of the things, to which they are applyed, as also because of the slownesse of peoples apprehensions of them, as appears by the non-practise of them, the which wherever you see drayning and trenching you shall rarely finde few or none of them wrought to the bottome. But for these common and many trenches, ofttimes crooked too, that men usually make in their boggy grounds, some one foot, some two, I say away with them as a great piece of folly, lost labor and spoyle, which I desire to preserve the reader from.

Equally sagacious are the directions about outfalls to take thy water clearely from thy drayne.' On the subject of straitening tortuous and sluggish watercourses, this man of the Commonwealth was in advance not only of his own day but of ours:

'A strait water-course cut a considerable depth in a thousand parts of this nation would be more advantageous than we are aware of. And though many persons are interested therein, and some will agree, others will oppose; one creek lyeth on one side of the river in one lord's manor and another lyeth on the other side: why may not one neighbour change with another when both are gainers? I dare say thousands of acres of very rich land may thereby be gained, and possibly as many more much amended that are almost destroyed.'

And he proposes a law which shall give facilities for this improvement, and shall protect all interests. Having discoursed to the Lord General on seven prejudices to land, he thus proceeds :The eighth prejudice may be the many water-mills which destroy abundance of gallant land; turning it to a bog, or to mire, or else to flagg, rush, or mareblabb; some mills, worth 101. or 127. per annum, destroy lands worth 207., 307., or 401. per annum. I knowe it of my own knowledge'-Every word of which is as true in the year 1849 as it was in 1652; and the remedies which he proposes are now even more appropriate and efficient, because we are able to substitute steam power for wind and horses, which he contemplated. To prostrate the weirs on all our sluggish streams would be the greatest recovery of 'gallant' land which now remains feasible in England. The day of their doom is probably at hand. Most of our water cornmills are of barbarous structure, inconveniently situated as to roads, and expensive in the maintenance of their weirs, floodgates, banks, and goats. Many on the larger streams lose one-third of

* In the materials for forming the conduit in a covered drain, no advance seems to have been made from the time of Cato to that of Walter Blith. Cato says, 'Sulcos lapide consternito. Si lapis not erit, perticis saligneis viridibus quoquoversus collatis consternito. Si pertica non erit, sarmentis colligatis.' Blith's directions are- Thou must take good green faggots, willow, alder, elme, or thorne, and lay it in the bottome of thy works; or rather take great pibblestones or flintstones.'

their time in winter from excess of water, and those on the smaller the same amount in summer from deficiency. We remember an instance in which all the mills on the river Soare, in Leicestershire, stood still for six weeks continuously on account of flood. Through all the north and centre of England, as well as through considerable portions of the west, good engine coal is delivered at all railway stations at from 4s. to 7s. per ton, and 3s. 6d. per ton is not an uncommon price at the pits. These prices will be more effective enemies to the beggarly water-mills, and more powerful friends to the gallant lands, than Walter Blith's denunciations. In a report made by Mr. Josiah Parkes to the President of the Board of Health, we find the following remarks, to which we give our hearty assent:

'The sluggish rivers of the midland and southern counties of England oppose great impediments to land-drainage, being usually full to the banks, or nearly so, and converted into a series of ponds by milldams erected at a few miles distance below each other; so that frequently no effectual drainage of the richest alluvial soil, composing the meadows, can be made without forming embankments, or by pumping, or by resort to other expensive means. The greater number of corn and other water-mills throughout England ought to be demolished for the advantage of agriculture, and steam power should be provided for the millers. I believe that such an arrangement would in most cases prove to be economical for both parties.

A striking example of the economical and beneficial result arising from the destruction of milldams and the substitution of steam for water power has recently been exhibited under the operation of "The Rye and Derwent Drainage Act," resulting from the wise and friendly co-operation of the Earls of Carlisle and Fitzwilliam (the chief proprietors) with other land-owners, to knock down three milldams and give the millers steam, thereby restoring the river to its natural bed and proper function as the great artery of drainage, and enabling thousands of acres of land to be drained and reclaimed, or brought into more profitable cultivation at a very moderate cost. This excellent work has its termination at New Malton in Yorkshire.

'If all the rivers of England were surveyed from the sea to their source, the mills upon them valued, the extent of land injured or benefited by such milldams ascertained, and the whole question of advantage over injury done to the landowners appreciated and appraised, I have little doubt but that the injury done would be found so greatly to exceed the rental of these mills, deduction being made for the cost of maintaining them, that it would be a measure of national economy to buy up all the mills and give the millers steam-power.'

We wish our limits would permit us to follow the Captain through his dissertation on over-ploughing, thick and thin sowing, and various sorts of manures, and to extract a very acute passage on the application of chemistry to agriculture. We

strongly

strongly recommend the third edition of The English Improver' to such of our readers as are not scared by a discursive style and great neglect of arrangement, and are willing to winnow a great deal of corn out of a very confused heap of chaff. The work is embellished by a frontispiece, at the top of which the royal and parliamentary forces encounter each other in hostile array. In the centre they are beating their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks; and at the bottom they are ploughing with two horses abreast, and performing other agricultural operations. Various plates give drawings of a windmill fitted with a scoop or lading-wheel for draining fens, and a great number of agricultural tools and implements; among others, The Harfordshire wheeled-plough,' condemned by Blith for its clumsiness, but still retaining its place in parts of that county; and The double Plough ploughing two furrows at one time,' which still lingers in the midland counties. Nor must we forget a picture of the gallant Captain, given in connexion with a water-level devised by himself, and which seems to be identical with one lately re-introduced into this country from Italy, and patronized by Prince Albert and other eminent agriculturists. The Captain's figure is very imposing, but in most unagricultural garb-a wig as fine as the Speaker's, ruffles, trunk-hose, and spurs. He holds in his hand the levelling-staff, which is fitted with a sliding bull's-eye after the modern fashion. We part from this sagacious veteran with much affection. A fine patriotic spirit pervades all his reflections, as well as a strict morality, tinged perhaps with a little puritanism.*

In England the two cases of injury from water which has passed through the earth, and water which has not, are very frequently complicated, and run into one another by an almost insensible gradation. Except in very barbarous and some subalpine districts, the era of draining for mere springs has passed by, and the work has on the whole been well executed. We possess better materials for forming a conduit, and some better tools, but probably no other advantage over old Elkington.† We know very little beyond what he taught us, and perhaps do not require to know more. Joseph Elkington was a man of consi

Since we penned the above, we have observed that Mr. Parkes introduced Captain Blith to his hearers in a lecture delivered at Newcastle before the Royal Agricultural Society, and published in vol. vii. of their Journal. Mr. Parkes has selected for quotation from Blith several of the same passages as ourselves, and he mentions one remarkable point which had escaped us, that this old drainer' prescribes, in all cases, excepting for water-meadows, the driving the drains right up and down the fall of the land.'

↑ An Account of the most Approved Mode of Draining Land, according to the System practised by Mr. Joseph Elkington. By John Johnstone, Land Surveyor. Edinburgh, 1797.

derable

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 a 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. D Z 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.

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