n the same conditions prevail.

All this points to an immense recrudescence of irrigation in the near
future. Already the Californians and other Americans of the Pacific
Slope have demonstrated that irrigation is a practice fully as well
suited to the requirements of a thoroughly up-to-date people as it has
been for long ages to those of the "unchanging East". But here again
the question of cheap power obtrudes itself. The Chinese, Hindoos and
Egyptians have long ago passed the stage at which the limited areas
which were irrigable by gravitation, without advanced methods of
engineering, have been occupied; and the lifting of water for the
supplying of their paddy fields has been for thousands of years a
laborious occupation for the poorest and most degraded of the rural
population.

In a system of civilisation in which transport costs so little as it
does in railway and steam-ship freights, the patches of territory
which can be irrigated by water brought by gravitation from the hills
or from the upper reaches of rivers are comparatively easy of access
to a market. This fact retards the advent of the time when colossal
installations for the throwing of water upon the land will be
demanded. When that epoch arrives, as it assuredly will before the
first half of the twentieth century has been nearly past, the pumping
plants devoted to the purposes of irrigation will present as great a
contrast to the lifting appliances of the East as does a fully loaded
freight train or a mammoth steam cargo-slave to a coolie carrier.

At the same time there must inevitably be a great extension of the
useful purposes to which small motors can be applied in irrigation.
Year by year the importance of the sprinkler, not only for ornamental
grounds such as lawns and flower-beds, but also for the vegetable
patch and the fruit garden, becomes more apparent, and efforts are
being made towards the enlargement of the arms of sprinkling
contrivances to such an extent as to enable them to throw a fine
shower of water over a very large area of ground. Sometimes a windmill
is used for pumping river or well-water into high tanks from which it
descends by gravitation into the sprinklers, the latter being operated
by the power of the liquid as it descends. This mode of working is
convenient in many cases; but a more important, because a more widely
applicable, method in the future will be that in which the wind-motor
not only lifts the water, but scatte