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thinks it advisable to grow in between the trees of a 10-acre bearing pear orchard.

This will convey a brief but positively reliable idea of the underlying water supply of the Texas coast for irrigation purposes. It remains to add a word concerning the use of water for irrigation purposes in this section. The structure of the soil is somewhat peculiar in that it is naturally subirrigated; that is to say, there is plenty of water within from 7 to 15 feet of the surface. An ordinary barnyard well does not exceed in most instances 10 to 12 feet in depth. Almost all the varieties of trees planted in the orchards here readily send their roots to this and greater depths, and hence for commercial orchards irrigation is not essential. This is especially true if timely, judicious, and frequent cultivation be given. With the berry grower and market gardener the conditions are different. His crops must be made within a specified period to obtain the best results and greatest returns. To accomplish this it is essential that a good supply of water be at command to force the crops when conditions of great heat and drought develop. At the same time it should be noted that perhaps 90 per cent of the berry growers and gardeners have not yet provided irrigation works, and they have been, in a measure, doing business with a small but very uncertain margin of profit. They have hoped each year that it would not be necessary for them to irrigate. Two successive seasons of drought, however, have induced them to prepare to avail themselves of the ample supply of water. Within two years from this time probably the greater part of the most intelligent berry and truck growers will be fully equipped with an irrigation plant of some description.

The advantages of having irrigation facilities were abundantly illustrated in 1896. Those who had such equipments were not only selling more products at the same time that their neighbors were offering theirs, but were selling long and profitably after their less fortunate competitors could not produce sufficiently to make an attempt at marketing advisable. This is especially noteworthy in the case of the strawberry growers in the coast country.

This second division has been arbitrarily drawn to include the irrigation plants, mostly small in size, situated within the central part of Texas, from about the vicinity of Brazos River westerly to the edge of the arid region, and from the vicinity of Austin, on the south, northerly through the State. This area falls between the lines of mean annual precipitation of 20 and 40 inches, and thus includes the tract of country having sufficient rainfall to raise crops in ordinary seasons. The precipitation is fairly uniformly distributed by months, as shown by the diagram of mean monthly rainfall at Austin in fig. 2 (p. 23). The black, waxy soil which covers a considerable portion of