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I wanted both a house in which I should not feel ashamed to live, and cultivable land enough to yield a revenue; and the two together seemed impossible to find, at least for the sum of money which was placed at my disposal.
On this scanty cultivable ground, there are forty-one settlements, called pueblas or townships, in the isla grande, or large island of Chiloé. There is one road indeed across the mountains, but the whole interior of the island is uninhabited.
If now and again the touch is too idyllic, it was still a prodigious gain to let the country know in a definite way that of the fifty million arpents of cultivable land in the realm, more than one quarter lay either unbroken or abandoned.
With the development of the talus the area of bottom land dwindles, and the former encroaches more and more until a little above the junction of Monument canyon the bottom land is limited to narrow strips and small patches here and there. These bottom lands are the cultivable areas of the canyon bottom, and their occurrence and distribution have dictated the location of the villages now in ruins.
If a system of lofty continuous dikes, like those of the Po, had really been adopted in Egypt, in the early dynasties when the power and the will to undertake the most stupendous material enterprises were so eminently characteristic of the government of that country, and persevered in through later ages, and the waters of the annual inundation had thus been permanently prevented from flooding the land, it is conceivable that the productiveness of the small area of cultivable soil in the Nile valley might have been long kept up by artificial irrigation and the application of manures.
What I want to do now is to inquire into its origin, and to follow up in fancy the same process, still in action, till it has filled the Adriatic from end to end with one great cultivable lowland.
The development of a great system of irrigation canals added large new tracts of hitherto barren wastes to the cultivable area of the country, and an elaborate machinery of precautionary measures and relief works was created to mitigate the hardships of periodical famines unavoidable in regions where a predominantly agricultural population is largely dependent for existence on the varying abundance or shortage of the seasonal rainfalls.
It illustrates, moreover, the importance which was attached to a command or outlook over extensive cultivable areas, as to obtain such an outlook the builders were content to occupy even such an unsuitable site as the one described.
These lakes have but a narrow strip of cultivable land. Along the right margin of the La Fourche, and the left of the Teche, they serve as a receptacle for the waters thrown from the plantations and those discharged by the Atchafalayah and the Plaquemine, which ultimately find their way to the Gulf through Berwick's Bay.
It has been shown in a former section that the dikes of the Netherlands and the adjacent states have protected a considerable extent of coast from the encroachments of the sea, an have won a large tract of cultivable land from the dominion of the ocean waters.
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