New York State Drain Tile and Fireproofing Works: Works and Main Office, Third Avenue, Albany, N. Y.

Excerpt from New York State Drain Tile and Fireproofing Works: Works and Main Office, Third Avenue, Albany, N. Y In almost every State in the Union there are to-day thousands of acres of valuable land, lands that with ordinary cultivation are yielding immense crops, where but a few years since were swamps and bogs. Nature has been good to man. It has given him a great abundance of raw materials with which to work; in the great varieties of soils and their indigenous growths she presents us an open book, which, if we will but study it, will teach us how to make her to us at first "waste places" to blossom as a garden. But nature gives us few perfect things ready made, and entirely fit for use. She requires us to work, to work with mind and muscle, and with strict justice she pays us for the work. The farmer who owns a swamp or bog, well knows that it, while it remains a swamp or bog, will yield no profitable crop; he knows that into this low spot the rains of countless ages have floated much of the decayed and decaying vegetation of the surrounding higher land, and that it has been as continuously, and to a much greater extent, enriched by the decay of it own rank growth, until the loam has become deep and strona;, capable of bearing grand crops - if, only, it were not so wet and cold. All such places may be drained; as remarked in our opening lines, thousands of acres have been so improved, always with paying results, and millions of other acres are awaiting improvement. Only within a comparatively few years have farmers begun to bestow upon this subject any considerable attention, and it still receives far less general consideration than it deserves. Yet the value of good drainage is becoming better known and more appreciated. Agriculture is the undisputed basis of all prosperity and wealth; it is the support and foundation for all other kinds of business, and yet has the least protection of any in this respect.