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 by him to water-meadows and swamps, and as applicable to the drainage of all other moist lands. We give from the 7th volume of the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society, in the language of that eminent advocate of deep-drainage, Josiah Parkes, an account of this rare book, and of the principles which it advocates, as a fitting introduction to the more modern and more perfect system of thorough drainage: