Rain follows the plough, people said knowingly in late-nineteenth-century America. The phrase was promulgated in a book published in 1881 by one Charles Dana Wilber, a land speculator who was au courant with the climatology of his day. It distilled the theories of some prominent Earth scientists that settlement and cultivation, especially the planting of trees, would transform arid regions, notably the Great Plains beyond the hundredth meridian, into fertile, loamy expanses bathed in rain, like the agriculturally fecund Mississippi Valley.
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机译：人们在19世纪后期知道，雨水随着犁而下。这个短语是由一位土地投机者Charles Dana Wilber在1881年出版的一本书中颁布的，他当时对当时的气候很不满意。它提炼了一些杰出的地球科学家的理论，即定居和耕种，尤其是植树造林，将把干旱地区，尤其是超过一百个子午线的大平原转变成肥沃的，浸在雨中的肥沃大片土地，就像农业繁茂的密西西比河谷一样。
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