The Earth as Modified by Human Action eBook

by the labors of those from whom they were inherited.  Landed property, therefore, the transfer of which is happily free from every legal impediment or restriction in the United States, would find, in the feelings thus prompted, a moral check against a too frequent change of owners, and would tend to remain long enough in one proprietor or one family to admit of gradual improvements which would increase its value both to the possessor and to the state.] We have now felled forest enough everywhere, in many districts far too much.  Let us restore this one element of material life to its normal proportions, and devise means of maintaining the permanence of its relations to the fields, the meadows, and the pastures, to the rain and the dews of heaven, to the springs and rivulets with which it waters the earth.  The establishment of an approximately fixed ratio between the two most broadly characterized distinctions of rural surface—­woodland and ploughland—­would involve a certain persistence of character in all the branches of industry, all the occupations and habits of life, which depend upon or are immediately connected with either, without implying a rigidity that should exclude flexibility of accommodation to the many changes of external circumstance which human wisdom can neither prevent nor foresee, and would thus help us to become, more emphatically, a well-ordered and stable commonwealth, and, not less conspicuously, a people of progress.

CHAPTER IV.

The waters.

Land Artificially won from the Waters—­Great Works of Material
Improvement—­Draining of Lincolnshire Fens—­Incursions of the Sea in the
Netherlands—­Origin of Sea-dikes—­Gain and Loss of Land in the
Netherlands—­Marine Deposits on the Coast of Netherlands—­Draining of
Lake of Haarlem—­Draining of the Zuiderzee—­Geographical Effects of
Improvements in the Netherlands—­Ancient Hydraulic Works—­Draining of
Lake Celano by Prince Torlonia—­Incidental Consequences of draining
Lakes—­Draining of Marshes—­Agricultural Draining—­Meteorological
Effects of Draining—­Geographical Effects of Draining—­Geographical
Effects of Aqueducts and Canals—­Antiquity of Irrigation—­Irrigation in
Palestine, India, and Egypt—­Irrigation in Europe—­Meteorological
Effects of Irrigation—­Water withdrawn from Rivers for
Irrigation—­Injurious Effects of Rice-culture—­Salts Deposited by Water
of Irrigation—­Subterranean Waters—­Artesian Wells—­Artificial
Springs—­Economizing Precipitation—­Inundations in France—­Basins of
Reception—­Diversion of Rivers—­Glacier Lakes—­River Embankments—­Other
Remedies against Inundations—­Dikes of the Nile—­Deposits of Tuscan
Rivers—­Improvements in Tuscan Maremma—­Improvements in Val di
Chiana—­Coast of the Netherlands.

Land artificially won from the Waters.