um 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
Aquae 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