erally emphasized sufficiently "the special characteristics due to the unvarying fertility, the enervating facility, and the great vulnerability of irrigation systems. Societies," he goes on to say, "have been divided into nomadic, agricultural, manufacturing, and commercial types. The distinction that has not been made and studied in its very important results is that which makes a separate class of the irrigating agriculturist, — safe against climatic risks; crowded in small holdings; dependent on combined action for the construction of irrigation works; the ready victim of any violence which seizes some certain ditch. Contrast him with his brother who lives by the grace of uncertain rains; forced to a prevision which makes the lean year borrow from the fat; able to live wide apart from his neighbor, developing thereby an independent individualism which may ripen into civil order and liberty; each farmer whose land has its own water supply capable of making some military resistance."
In view of the famines of the irrigated lands of India and Persia, and in view of other facts to be presented later, I question whether the irrigating agriculturist is "safe against climatic risks." The highly organized, peaceful condition of many communities where irrigation is practiced raises a presumption that universal dependence on a few canals which are virtually public property may be as effective as "independent individualism" in leading to "civil order." Nevertheless, Crosby's idea that the inhabitants of irrigated oases are subjected to peculiar conditions which give rise to a distinct type of social organization is an important contribution to geography.
Younghusband, less consciously, expresses the same idea
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