of heat.  A thousand years has made no alteration in the way of making these pipes.  Here, however, the ground is so level that one great characteristic of Moorish waterworks is not to be seen.  I mean the water-columns which are such a feature in the country round Palermo, and in other places where the system of irrigation introduced by the Moorish invaders is still kept up.  These are square pillars twenty or thirty feet high, with a cistern at the top of each, into which the water from the higher level flowed, and from which other pipes carried it on; the sole object of the whole apparatus being to break the column of water, and reduce the pressure to the thirty or forty feet which the pipes of earthenware would bear.

This subject of irrigation is very interesting with reference to the future of Mexico.  We visited two or three country-houses in the plateaux, where the gardens are regularly watered by artificial channels, and the result is a vegetation of wonderful exuberance and beauty, converting these spots into oases in the desert.  On the lower levels of the tierra templada where the sugar-cane is cultivated, a costly system of water-supply has been established in the haciendas with the best results.  Even in the plains of Mexico and Puebla, the grain-fields are irrigated to some small degree.  But notwithstanding this progress in the right direction, the face of the country shows the most miserable waste of one of the chief elements of the wealth and prosperity of the country, the water.

In this respect, Spain and the high lands of Mexico may be compared together.  There is no scarcity of rain in either country, and yet both are dry and parched, while the number and size of their torrent-beds show with what violence the mountain-streams descend into lakes or rivers, rather agents of destruction than of benefit to the land.  Strangely enough, both countries have been in possession of races who understood that water was the very life-blood of the land, and worked hard to build systems of arteries to distribute it over the surface.  In both countries, the warlike Spaniards overcame these races, and irrigating works already constructed were allowed to fall to ruin.

When the Moriscos were expelled from their native provinces of Andalusia and Granada, their places were but slowly filled up with other settlers, so that a great part of their aqueducts and watercourses fell into decay within a few years.  These new colonists, moreover, came from the Northern provinces, where the Moorish system of culture was little understood; and, incredible as it may seem, though they must have had ocular evidence of the advantages of artificial irrigation, they even neglected to keep in repair the water-channels on their own ground.  Now the traveller, riding through Southern Spain, may see in desolate barren valleys remains of the Moorish works which centimes ago brought fertility to grain-fields and orchards, and made the country the garden of Europe.