INUNDATION OF LANDS. Fields are sometimes covered with water in agriculture, especially meadows, and in the cultivation of rice. The water is let in by sluices, and allowed to remain for several days or weeks, and, in meadows, during the whole winter. It kills those weeds which are not aquatic, serves to manure the soil, and, in the case of meadows, advances the grass by some weeks, the water protecting it from frost. The lands should be well drained, or ou a porous soil; otherwise the water, sinking, will stagnate, and become injuri ous; it should be perfectly let out by numerous drains. By this practice, rueadows have been rendered fertile without other manure for ages. The sediment deposited is sometimes called warp, and the inundation warping. The inundation of land by freshets, always causes renewed fer tility. Those bottom and intervale lands, sub ject to periodic overflow, are the most perma nently fertile in the country, bringing crops year after year, and generation after generation,with out manure. Unfortunately some of these, as
the great bottom lands along the Mississippi and Missouri, can not easily be protected from extra ordinary floods, and hence great damage, com plete destruction to crops, and even loss of life to the inhabitants as well as to live stock, some times occurs. The great floods of the Mississippi are not soon forgotten, and that of 1881. extend ing, as it did,the whole length of the valley,from St. Paul to the Gulf of Mexico, intensified, as'it was by the inundations along the length of the Missouri, (the first severe one since the settle ment of the upper Missouri valley,) entailing vast loss of property in crops, live stock, and even human life, will long be remeffibered, and should cause energetic steps to be at once taken to pre vent it in future—a difficult problem but one by no means insurmountable.