I.
"—the defenced city shall be desolate, and the habitation forsaken, and left like a wilderness."—Isaiah, xxvii: 10.
It is a fact, which has impressed itself upon all readers of history, that countries which have been the homes of the most powerful and cultured nations, are now great stretches of the veriest desert. No country teaches this truth better than the extensive valley of the Mesopotamia which looms giant-like in the dawn of history. Upon its plains and highlands, the great nations of antiquity acted the tragedies of their existence; like the schoolboys' snowman, they rose, with vast proportions, in a day, and fell ere the setting of the next sun. In this district, advanced and retreated with wonderful precision, as it appears to us so many ages removed from the time of action, the Chaldeans, the Babylonians and the Assyrians; here the Medes and Persians achieved the victories that made them famous, and here came all the great generals of old to crown their successes. A hundred populous cities clustered, in the lower part of the valley, around Babylon the great, the most marvelous city of any past age; a hundred cities were in the upper half, with Nineveh, also magnificent and great, as their center. From Mesopotamia come evidences of art—painting, sculpture, music, literature and architecture—the indication of a higher civilization. Still, today, even the sites of many of the great cities are lost, and Mesopotamia is a stretch of barren land.
To the west of Mesopotamia is the valley containing the promised land of Palestine—it, also, has fallen from its former splendor, and is a desert compared with the days of its greatest prosperity. Still further west and south lies the land of Egypt, in the valley of the Nile. It was the fostermother of science, and the shaker of empires. It has fallen likewise; and a blight has come upon the soil, until it bears the appearance of a sandy waste. Over the sites of other famous nations of antiquity, in Europe and Asia, hovers, today, the spirit of desolation.
The same story is told on the American continent. Peru, the land of the Incas, once populous, powerful, wealthy, is today largely a wilderness. Mexico, the Aztec home, is now a vast desert, in spite of the evidence, through the discovered ruins of mighty cities and gigantic temples, that it was once the home of a strong people. Central America tells a similar story. It seems to be a general fact that wherever a large people lived formerly, there, today, a desert often occurs.
However, these countries are deserts only because human effort is no longer applied to them; by proper treatment the lands would again be raised to the flourishing condition that prevailed in their prosperous days. Intrinsically the soils are extremely fertile, but are dry and require the application of water to make the fertility suitable for the use of crops. The soils of Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, Peru and Mexico, raise crops of wonderful yields when properly irrigated; and there is abundant proof that in former days irrigation was practiced in these countries on a scale far larger than in Utah or in any other country of the present day.
Many of the old irrigation canals of Babylon still exist, and prove the magnitude of the practice, there, of the art of irrigation. The old historians, also, agree in explaining the ingenious devices by which whole rivers were turned from their courses to flow over the soil. In Egypt, likewise, irrigation was more commonly practiced in the past than it is today; though even now a large portion of the soil of that country is made to yield crops by the artificial application of water. In Peru, Central America, and Mexico, the irrigation canals that remain from prehistoric days are even more wonderful as feats of engineering and as evidences of a populous and enlightened condition of the country than the massive temples and extensive cities that are also found. In the construction of these canals every precaution, apparently, was taken to have the water applied to the lands in the right manner, and to reduce the loss to a minimum. In some places immense canals remain, that are tiled for miles, on sides and bottom, in order to render them watertight, and thus prevent any loss by seepage.
Instead of saying, then, that the countries where most great nations have lived are now deserts, we may as well say that most great nations have lived in countries where irrigation was necessary; in fact, that history indicates that a dense population, and high culture, usually go hand in hand with a soil that thirsts for water. What can science, the great explainer, say on this subject?