3-065-606 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Famine in Bengal: Indian mode of irrigation, 1874. Illustration showing the mode of '...applying water to the fields, as practised from time immemorial by the poor husbandmen of India... [The engraving depicts] the apparatus of pulleys for raising water from a well by the aid of a yoke of bullocks. The Persian wheel, furnished with a series of buckets around its circumference, one half of which is immersed in the tank or canal, so that each bucket on the ascending side of the wheel comes up full of water and discharges itself into an elevated gutter or channel, has long been a familiar invention to us'. From "Illustrated London News", 1874.