As yet, each farmer must study his own resources with intent to make the most of them. If a manageable stream crosses or issues from his land, he must measure its fall thereon, study the lay of the land, and determine whether he can or cannot, at a tolerable cost, make that stream available in the irrigation of at least a portion of his growing crops when they shall need water and the skies decline to supply it. On many, I think on most, farms situated among hills, or upon the slopes of mountains, something may be done in this way--done at once, and with immediate profit. But this is rudimentary, partial, fragmentary, when compared with the irrigation which yet shall be. I am confident that there are points on the Carson, the Humboldt, the Weber, the South Platte, the Cache-le-Poudre, and many less noted streams which thrid the central plateau of our continent, where an expenditure of $10,000 to $50,000 may be judiciously made in a dam, locks and canals, for the purposes of irrigation and milling combined, with a moral certainty of realizing fifty per cent. annually on the outlay, with a steady increase in the value of the property. If my eye did not deceive me, there is one point on the Carson where a dam that need not cost $50,000 would irrigate one hundred square miles of rich plain which, when I saw it eleven years ago, grew nought but the worthless shrubs of the desert, simply because nothing else could endure the intense, abiding drouth of each Nevada Summer. Such palpable invitations to thrift cannot remain forever unimproved. In regions like this, where Summer rains are the rule rather than the exception, the need of irrigation is not so palpable, since we do or may secure decent average crops in its absence. Yet there is no farm in our country that would not yield considerably more grain and more grass, more fruit and more vegetables, if its owner had water at command which he could apply at pleasure and to any extent he should deem requisite. Most men, thus empowered, would at first irrigate too often and too copiously; but experience would soon temper their zeal, and teach them "The precious art of Not too much;" and they would thenceforth be careful to give their soil drink yet, not drown it. * * * * * Whoever lives beyond the close of this century, and shall then traverse our prairie States, will see them whitened at intervals by the broad sails of windmills erected over wells, whence every gale or breeze will be employed in pumping water into the ponds or reservoirs so located that water may be drawn therefrom at will and diffused in gentle streamlets over the surrounding fields to invigorate and impel their growing crops. And, when all has been done that this paper faintly foreshadows, our people will have barely indicated, not by any means exhausted, the beneficent possibilities of irrigation.