pounds of hay a day, and is given a
chance to rest 16 hours out of 24--providing also it has a dentist to
take care of its teeth occasionally, and a blacksmith chiropodist to
keep it in shoes. On the hoof, this horsepower is worth about
$200--unless the farmer is looking for something fancy in the way of
drafters, when he will have to go as high as $400 for a big fellow.
And after 10 or 15 years, the farmer would look around for another
horse, because an animal grows old.

This animal horsepower isn't a very efficient horsepower. In fact, it
is less than three-fourths of an actual horsepower, as engineers use
the term. A real horsepower will do the work of lifting 33,000 pounds
one foot in one minute--or 550 pounds one foot in one second. Burn a
pint of gasoline, with 14 pounds of air, in a gasoline engine, and the
engine will supply one 33,000-pound horsepower for an hour. The
gasoline will cost about 2 cents, and the air is supplied free. If it
was the air that cost two cents a pound, instead of the gasoline, the
automobile industry would undoubtedly stop where it began some fifteen
years ago. It is human nature, however, to grumble over this two
cents.

Yet the average farmer who would get excited if sound young chunks and
drafters were running wild across his pastures, is not inspired by any
similar desire of possession and mastery by the sight of a brook, or a
rivulet that waters his meadows. This brook or river is flowing down
hill to the sea. Every 4,000 gallons that falls one foot in one
minute; every 400 gallons that falls 10 feet in one minute; or every
40 gallons that falls 100 feet in one minute, means the power of one
horse going to waste--not the $200 flesh-and-blood kind that can lift
only 23,000 pounds a foot a minute--but the 33,000 foot-pound kind.
Thousands of farms have small streams in their very dooryard, capable
of developing five, ten, twenty, fifty horsepower twenty-four hours a
day, for the greater part of the year. Within a quarter of a mile of
the great majority of farms (outside of the dry lands themselves)
there are such streams. Only a small fraction of one per cent of them
have been put to work, made to pay their passage from the hills to the
sea.

The United States government geological survey engineers recently made
an estimate of the waterfalls capable of developing 1,000 horsepower
and over, that are running to waste, unused, in this country. They
estimated that there is available