plant life, and proceeding slowly towards the equator would prevent him from understanding the reverse condition on our planet, with the shade of green being perennial at the equator and spreading slowly north with the advance of summer. The marvels of irrigation are impossible to conceive of without first seeing a parched land before the water channels are dug and the exuberant vegetation springing with the water's advent. The illimitable stretches of arid plain, no green, rarely an evidence of life, and then usually in hideous shapes like the hissing and purple-mouthed Gila monster; hot pale dust; blinding sunlight; ragged clumps of gray sagebrush, rebuking by their hopeless color and dishevelled appearance, the intolerable condition of their existence; angular cacti, surviving because of their vicious needles, and then literally a step only from this sterile waste, and one finds himself wading through rich, soft alfalfa, under the deep shade of cottonwood trees, glistening threads of water when the overhanging vegetation does not hide the channels, brilliant flowers, singing birds, fat cattle and vociferous children. In this apparently irreclaimable desert of Arizona, have sprung up prosperous cities, great farms and fruit orchards. About Phoenix, more than one hundred and twenty-five thousand acres are under the richest and most profitable cultivation, and all due to a little narrow canal which conveys the water from Salado River, and distributes it by narrow ditches, so narrow, indeed, as to be invisible except on the nearest approach. There have already been constructed in the Gila Valley alone, two hundred and fifty miles of ditches, and four hundred miles of parallels. Mr. Ray Stannard Baker, in the "Century" for July, 1902, presents in a graphic way, the marvels of irrigation. Major J. W. Powell, during the later years of his life devoted his whole time and energy to urging the reclamation of desert lands in the West by irrigation. In his reports on the subject he estimated that a region equal in size to New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia could be recovered from the desert sands of Arizona and other regions in the West. In India, millions of pounds have been spent for irrigating canals and ditches. A single canal with its tributaries drawing water from the Ganges measures 3,910 miles in length, bringing into cultivation one million acres of land at an expense of fifteen millions of dollars. The idea of irrigation is not due to the advanced intellect of man; it has been the result of dire necessity and is of great antiquity. Mr. Frank Hamilton Cushing discovered evidences of the most extensive irrigating canals among the ancient Pueblo Indians of Arizona.