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The reclamation of bogs and swamps by draining off the surface-water is doubtless much more ancient than the draining of lakes. The beneficial results of the former mode of improvement are more unequivocal, and balanced by fewer disadvantages, and, at the same time, the processes by which it is effected are much simpler and more obvious.
As Bacquerel has observed, common road and railway ditches are among the most efficient conduits for the discharge of surface-water which man has yet constructed, and of course they are powerful agents in causing river inundations. As every civilized country is, in some degree, subject to inundation by the overflow of rivers, the evil is a familiar one, and needs no general description.
In connection with this surface-water system, there was elaborated a system of latrines and other contrivances of a sanitary nature, which are 'staggeringly modern' in their appointments. In the north-eastern quarter, under the Corridor of the Game-Board, are still preserved some of the terra-cotta pipes which served as connections to the main drain.
His theory was, that the dense covering of trees and shrubs protected the soil and the surface-water from the rays of the sun, and so the cold which was stored up in the cave was enabled to withstand the attacks of the heat of summer.
The surface-water with which it is saturated is in part fresh, and in other parts tequisquite; that is, where the waters have a current, they are fresh; but where they remain from year to year discharging their volume only by evaporation, then they become infused with the saline properties of the soil, and all about them is marked with barrenness.
We have been gathering the surface-water instead of going right down to the green sand, to which the artesian well must be sunk if the stream is to come up without pumping or wasting. So I say that a deeper reason than the sorrow and darkness of the heathen is 'the love of Christ constraineth me'; but yet the first is a legitimate one.
The younger woman stood at the door, gathering her dress about her ankles and gazing irresolutely at these frightful vestigia which gauged all too accurately the depth of the mud and the surface-water above it. "They look like the fossil bird-tracks in the Connecticut Valley sandstone," said Putnam, following the direction of her eyes. These were very large and black.
There are silent currents circulating perpetually from one part to another, and the surface-water that seems to be lost by evaporation is not really lost, but will descend in distant places and seasons, with its bitterness all distilled away, as life-giving rain. And as these surface-waters are drawn off into the clouds, their place is taken by lower layers continually rising from the depths.
They would both retard the delivery of surface-water and diminish the discharge of sediment into rivers, thus operating at once against the two most efficient causes of destructive floods. Dikes of the Nile.
Whatever covering is adopted for the walk itself, it must be of such a character as to prevent any thing like a free admission of surface-water. Concrete will do this perfectly; and either ashes, or gravel dressed at the top with ashes, if well raked and rolled at the outset to a smooth surface, will soon become so bound together as to shed pretty nearly all rain falling upon it.
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