"Having taken great interest in the problem of irrigation for twenty years and over, I had intended to be present at your meeting, but at this date I find it will be impossible. If a man possesses a mite of knowledge or an idea on this great subject, it is his duty to give his co-workers the benefit of it. "During a residence of thirty-four years in the Sacramento Valley, I have had time and opportunity to observe and to study its sanitary conditions, and these observations bear directly, I think, on the subject of the effect of irrigation on the health of a country. I am led by these observations to reject almost _in toto_ the long-accepted theory of infection by malaria from the atmosphere, that is, so far as it pertains to California. I will not consume your time with a technical dissertation, but will state some facts as briefly as possible, and in plain, homely phrase. "When I saw people living all along the margins of the tules, where in summer the water became hot and stale and full of decaying vegetation, and hundreds of forms of animal life, and yet remain entirely free from malarial influence, I began to think there was some mistake in the accepted theory. I do not pretend to say that all the people living along the tule margins were or are healthy. All who occupy some places seem to be attacked by chills, while the occupants of places close by are never so attacked. Health is the rule. I saw that all these people, those on the healthy and those on the sickly places, must breathe the same air, coming to them from the same hot, stagnant water and decaying vegetation, and I concluded that malaria was not in the air. But I investigated further. "There are clay, or, as some call them, hardpan banks to the upper Sacramento River, which are from a quarter of a mile to a mile apart. The river, for some very indefinite number of centuries, has vibrated between these banks--washing in on one side and filling in on the other. There is, then, an old or clay formation and a newer or alluvial formation; of course, there is alluvium on top of the clay, but this is not to our purpose. When I first saw the valley in 1850, this new land, some of it as high as the old, was covered with pea vines, blackberry vines, and a dense undergrowth generally, while the other grew wild oats and was usually as open as our wheat-fields. I began to notice that those people who built their houses and _dug their wells_ on a newer formation generally had chills, while the others, as a rule, had not. Sometimes these sickly and healthy places would be but a few feet apart. They breathed the same air, but they _did not drink the same water_. I began to conclude that these people, both along the river and around the margins of the tules, drank the germ of disease and did not breathe it, and I continued my observations.