inches of the top of the bank. It irrigates two hundred thousand acres through sixty-five laterals, of an aggregate length of one hundred and fifty miles.

But the glory of Kern is the enormous irrigation system upon the Kern Delta, constructed by two San Francisco capitalistsLloyd Tevis and J. B. Haggin. All in all, it is the largest enterprise of the kind of which I have any knowledge. The total expenditure has been fully four million dollars. For this the owners have obtained a system of twenty-seven main canals with an aggregate length of three hundred miles, besides about eleven hundred miles of permanent laterals. Six hundred thousand acres can be watered from these artificial rivers. The sandy plain slopes south and west upon a grade of five or six feet to the mile. Very little of the land requires leveling. The great reservoir, a former lake basin, covers twenty-five thousand acres and contains fifty billion gallons of water. The various canals of this company and others take from Kern River alone a total of twelve thousand cubic feet of water per second.

Twenty years ago the value of such land was less than a dollar an acre. No settler could live on a quarter section, and like Fresno, Tulare, and in fact most of the San Joaquin Valley, it was used only for pasturage. To-day there are fields of hundreds of acres of alfalfa, where the best of Jerseys and Holsteins are kept; there are orchards of peaches, apricots, prunes, and almondsthousands of acres-loaded each year with fruit; cotton, sugar beets, the sugar cane of Louisiana, tobacco, corn, cassava, and a multitude of the products of the temperate and semitropic regions thrive here and can be grown as staple crops.

Irrigation is often supposed to belong only to the arid lands. There, it is true, it produces the most surprising changes and the greatest proportionate increase of values. Water poured upon a rainless desert makes it blossom under the tropic sun as if some magician's wand had been waved over it. Vines, fruits, flowers, green lawns, golden wheat, and silver barley, for miles on miles, all lifted by the sparkling rivers above the fluctuations of the season-such are the changes the irrigator brings to the desert. But thousands of valleys and hillsides in the arid regions have enough rainfall to enable farmers to struggle along, and not enough to make their crops a certainty every year. Here there is an even more immediate need of water to supplement the natural supply. No available statistics can illustrate the extent to which pioneers in the Rockies, Sierras, and Coast Range are developing cheaply and easily a local supply of water for their ranches. The last census, which says there are about thirteen thousand irrigators in California (there are really twice as many), is very incomplete in this direction. Besides the organ

ized districts and the great irrigation corporations, there are illustrations in thousands of beautiful and fertile valleys, and upon many a sunny hillside, that it pays to irrigate.

In the old placer-mining regions of California one sees much of the local use of water, ranch by ranch, spring by spring, cheaply, easily, and effectually. The miners have long been familiar with the management of water. They built hundreds of miles of hydraulic mining ditches, triumphs of engineering skill, bringing whole rivers from the snow peaks to the beds of gold-bearing gravel below. They siphoned streams over mountains; they belted their flumes in mid-air to perpendicular cliffs of granite a thousand feet from base to crest; they changed little Alpine valleys into mountain lakes. Such men as these find it only child's play to water their hillside gardens, to wall up the "flats" by mountain streams and flood them so that the white clover or alfalfa keeps green there all the year. Thus one finds oases of verdure and fruitfulness about the cottage houses of thousands of mountaineers in Shasta, Trinity, Butte, Lassen, El Dorado, and the whole Sierra range of mining counties south of "Old Tuolumne." Such men as these live in all the mountain ranges of the western half of the continent, and not the least attractive chapter of the story of irrigation is that which tells of their home acres. Even where the annual rainfall is more than sufficient for the ordinary field crops and the deciduous fruits to thrive without irrigation, the dry air and sunlight of the semitropic summers often make the application of water desirable for specialized horticulture, or for the greatest obtainable profit from ordinary crops.

Here, then, are the primary schools of the irrigator in the thousands of hidden valleys of Idaho, Dakota, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, and California. Out of them, upon the wide valley plains, upon the vast distances of the high desert mesa lands, the young men of the coming generation of irrigation adepts pass on to greater victories. Artesian fountains spring up along their paths; rivers from regions of mountains, of forests and abundant rainfall, follow in their footsteps; they lead these rivers into the desert and plant gardens there-the grape, the olive, the date palm, the orange, the lemon, the banana, the pomegranate.

The facts and figures which I have used to show the progress of the States and Territories of the arid region are crowded with infinite suggestions and possibilities. Some time, it is not improbable, men may speak of the overflowing granaries, the unparalleled horticultural wealth along the Rio Grande, the Colorado, the Sacramento, the San Joaquin, and other great river plains, as history speaks of Egypt and Assyria in their splendid prime. What are the duties of the American people toward irri

VOL. XLIII.-12

gation in these all-important years of the beginnings of new commonwealths based upon new industries? Millions of acres of land are forever worthless without water. Who shall own the streams and reservoirs-a few far-sighted men, or the people themselves? Irrigation journals and conventions of irrigators discuss the matter from the standpoint of the present, and endeavor to shape legislation to profitable ends. The slow, dumb masses have not yet recognized the magnitude of the problems involved. An effort is being made to have the United States give all the arid lands to the several States and Territories in which they lie, but the plan is dangerous. Only the Federal Government can protect the sources of water supply; utilize, reservoir, and distribute that supply, and unite water and land in an indissoluble marriage bond.

THE INADEQUACY OF "NATURAL SELECTION."

TH

BY HERBERT SPENCER.

[Concluded.]

HIS very pronounced opinion will be met on the part of some by a no less pronounced demurrer, which involves a denial of possibility. It has been of late asserted, and by many believed, that inheritance of acquired characters can not occur. Weismann, they say, has shown that there is early established in the evolution of each organism, such a distinctness between those component units which carry on the individual life and those which are devoted to maintenance of the species, that changes in the one can not affect the other. We will look closely into his doctrine.

Basing his argument on the principle of the physiological division of labor, and assuming that the primary division of labor is that between such part of an organism as carries on individual life and such part as is reserved for the production of other lives, Weismann, starting with "the first multicellular organism," says that "Hence the single group would come to be divided into two groups of cells, which may be called somatic and reproductivethe cells of the body as opposed to those which are concerned with reproduction" (Essays upon Heredity, p. 27).

Though he admits that this differentiation "was not at first absolute, and indeed is not always so to-day," yet he holds that the differentiation eventually becomes absolute in the sense that the somatic cells, or those which compose the body at large, come to have only a limited power of cell-division, instead of an unlimited power which the reproductive cells have; and also in the